‘Joe Biden is right to withdraw from Afghanistan – despite handing it to Taliban’ – Jesse Hicks – World News
It was predictable that a largely corrupt, untrained fighting force would melt away as soon as the money spigot turned off – how much longer could the US have drawn out this deadly military experiment, argues Jesse Hicks
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Afghanistan: Taliban spokesman discusses women’s education
After nearly 20 years of war, the United States has left Afghanistan.
The exit was never likely to be clean: in the wake of the September 11 attacks and at the now-dim beginning of the War on Terror, the US military invaded and then proceeded to occupy the country.
From the beginning, it was an act of retribution, initially focused on Osama bin Laden, who was offered up by the Taliban in October 2001, in a deal rejected by former president George W Bush.
Soon, we were told, the mission became about denying extremists a safe haven from which to strike the United States; two decades later, there’s no need for such a safe haven as extremism has found root elsewhere.
With the force of inertia, it became about nation-building, our foreign policy mandarins said, about bringing democracy to a people who had never known self-governance.
As each year ticked by, the deadly, purposeless US experiment in Afghanistan meandered on, borne by nothing but its own history.
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President Joe Biden was right to end it.
The end has already proven a catastrophe. The Taliban have swiftly recaptured the country, ready to impose themselves upon a population of 39 million; images from the Kabul airport show thousands of Afghans desperate to escape.
Journalists, interpreters and locals who helped the Americans now wonder if they’ll be trapped.
Biden himself admitted the collapse “did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated”. His administration is now rightfully taking flak for not doing more to help refugees – if nothing else, the US owes the people of Afghanistan a safe haven after a generation of war, and should do everything in its power to alleviate the now-unfolding humanitarian disaster.
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Yet, as Biden also put it: “After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw US forces.” Serving under Obama, Biden had already seen how a president’s options can be captured by his military advisors. (Obama famously “surged” more troops into the country, to no lasting effect other than to prolong the inevitable.)
The rapid collapse of the Afghan government and military underscored what had been reported almost from the beginning: without US forces, there was no meaningful government or military in Afghanistan.
This was obvious. It was predictable that a largely corrupt, untrained fighting force would melt away as soon as the money spigot turned off. Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan’s president – known for his refusal to root out graft in his administration – fled for parts unknown as soon as the government’s collapse became inevitable – reportedly with piles of cash stuffed into his helicopter.
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The United States foreign policy establishment – the savvy people whose advice so often distills down to maintaining the status quo – have already begun caterwauling about the withdrawal from Afghanistan damaging American credibility, of it leaving a stain on history.
Ignore their abstract mewlings. In arguing that Biden should have put off withdrawal – for five more years? 10? 20? – they’re refusing to face reality: for two decades, the United States has spent billions of dollars, thousands of lives both American and Afghani, to build nothing but a mirage.
Now that mirage is collapsing, and the only question left is how to limit the damage.
