President Biden is choosing to act decisively rather than avoid the bad optics of bringing America’s two-decade military misadventure in Afghanistan to an end. The fall of Kabul and the Taliban’s return to power was inevitable.
The collapse of Afghanistan is nearly complete, with Taliban fighters now encircling the national capital, Kabul, after capturing every other major city in the country in barely more than a week. The U.S. intelligence assessment from June that warned of a total Taliban victory within six to 12 months of the withdrawal of American troops, has been revised sharply downward: first to one to three months, then to as little as 72 hours. Given the shocking momentum of the Taliban advance, it would not be surprising to see Kabul fall within a day. Though the Taliban says it has instructed its fighters not to attack Kabul and wait for the Afghan government’s surrender, they have been paying little heed to international calls for a peaceful transition or the preservation of human rights during their offensive thus far. They are already reportedly imposing their draconian rules on the cities they occupy — burqas for women, no education for girls, no smartphones — and threatening those who break them. Meanwhile, Afghan national forces are barely putting up a fight; in city after city, soldiers and officials of the U.S.-backed Afghan government have surrendered to the Taliban after putting up a token resistance at best. The Islamist militants are winning easily, as the one party that could have checked their advance — the U.S. military — is already most of its way out the door. The spiraling crisis in Afghanistan is becoming politically dicey for President Joe Biden — though just how dicey remains to be seen. Former president Donald Trump and other figures on the right are spinning the rapid collapse of the Afghan army and government as a massive failure on the part of the Biden administration. Their fantasy narrative is that Trump would have managed the withdrawal (which his administration negotiated with the Taliban and agreed to last year) more effectively, and somehow Afghanistan would have remained intact in the aftermath. This is, of course, nonsense. Trump would not have made any greater effort than Biden to protect the Afghan people as he withdrew U.S. forces — if anything, his track record and character suggest he would have been even more indifferent. His withdrawal would not have been “conditions-based,” as Trump claims, because the imagined conditions for an orderly U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan have never existed and will never exist. Three successive U.S. presidents attempted to produce those conditions, and they all kept getting sucked back in. Some commentators have, predictably, bought into the “Biden is losing Afghanistan” narrative. The pathos of Afghans already suffering under the psychotic austerity of Taliban rule, the shuttering of girls’ schools, the prospect of wholesale bloody revenge against anyone who supported the U.
