By giving up our leverage before U.S.-brokered peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government make progress, we are dooming millions of women, girls, and urban Afghans to civil war hell and eventual Taliban takeover.
When President Joe Biden announced he was ending “the forever war” in Afghanistan by pulling out the last 3,500 or so U.S. troops based there by Sept.11, my mind flashed to Afghans I know for whom that speech could spell prison or death. By giving up our leverage before U.S.-brokered peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government make progress, we are dooming millions of women, girls and urban Afghans to civil war hell and eventual Taliban takeover. Hundreds of thousands of students, female activists and ordinary Afghans face arrest or desperate flight in a massive refugee exodus. So there will be a terrible human — and moral — cost to this pullout from Afghanistan, which is why so many former U.S. officials who have served there have been so depressed and angry during phone interviews this week. (And that’s even before one gets to the strategic cost the United States will pay for leaving Afghanistan now.) “There is a humanitarian disaster coming,” I was told by David Sedney, a former top Pentagon official dealing with Afghanistan under President Barack Obama, who then became president of the American University of Afghanistan from 2019 to ’21.
