With less than a month to go until the 20th anniversary of the terror attacks that sparked the US invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban has …
With less than a month to go until the 20th anniversary of the terror attacks that sparked the US invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban has regained control of the country. Taliban fighters are now parked outside of the US Embassy in Kabul after a Saigon-esque evacuation that involved diplomats fleeing the building by helicopter. These were not the optics President Joe Biden was hoping for in April when he announced that American troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan, bringing an end to the longest war in US history. Just a week ago, the US military assessed it would take up to 90 days for the Taliban to capture the Afghan capital. By Sunday, this assessment was completely discredited as the Taliban entered Kabul. Indeed, the Biden administration was caught flatfooted by the blistering pace at which the Taliban advanced across Afghanistan in recent days, failing to recognize that the militant Islamist group would face little to no resistance on much of its march toward the capital. For weeks, President Joe Biden and his top advisors defended the US withdrawal from Afghanistan by citing how well-equipped and trained the Afghan military was. Over and over, the president and others in his administration reiterated that it was up to Afghans to take the fight to the Taliban and prevent the militant Islamist group from returning to power. In July, Biden expressed «trust» in the capacity of the Afghan military to keep the Taliban at bay, and denied that it was inevitable the militants would once again take over the. country. «The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely,» Biden said during a July 8 news conference, in words that have aged poorly and been disproven in a matter of weeks.
