"Not Our Tragedy": the Taliban Are Coming Back, and America Is Still Leaving [View all]

[Rustyeye77]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/not-our-tragedy-the-taliban-are-coming-back-and-america-is-still-leaving

At least Joe Biden is owning it. “I do not regret my decision,” the President said this week, as provincial capital after provincial capital in Afghanistan fell to the Taliban while the Afghan government—propped up by two decades of U.S. support—looked soon to suffer its long-predicted post-American collapse. “Afghan leaders have to come together. We lost thousands—lost to death and injury—thousands of American personnel. They’ve got to fight for themselves, fight for their nation,” Biden said on Tuesday, making it as clear as he could that he would not revisit his decision to pull out. America is finally, definitively, done with the war in Afghanistan after two decades, never mind the consequences.

The words from the Biden Administration in the face of this unfolding disaster have been strikingly cold. Biden himself, normally the most empathetic of politicians, did not address the predictable and predicted human tragedy that his April decision to withdraw the roughly thirty-five hundred U.S. troops remaining in Afghanistan has now unleashed. The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, followed his comments by blaming the Afghan military, which the U.S. funded, trained, equipped, and built over twenty years, for its fate. “They have what they need,” she said. “What they need to determine is if they have the political will to fight back.” The State Department, for its part, put out the word that it was making a last-ditch diplomatic push to convince the Taliban that their government will be an international pariah if they take over the country by force. Does anyone think that will stop them?

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“The general sense seems to be, ‘Hey, look, we’ve spent a lot of blood and treasure there for twenty years, we’ve done a lot, there’s a limit to what any country can do,’ ” Richard Fontaine, a former foreign-policy adviser to the late Senator John McCain who now heads the Center for a New American Security, told me. “This is tragic, but it’s not our tragedy.” While Fontaine and I were talking on Thursday, the news came from the Associated Press that Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city and the gateway to the country’s west, had fallen to the Taliban. Hours later, Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city and the birthplace of the Taliban movement, had fallen as well. Kabul, the capital, will soon be encircled by the Taliban, who in a matter of weeks have taken control of twelve of the country’s thirty-four provincial capitals. By the time you read this, that number may well be higher. On Thursday afternoon, the State Department and Pentagon announced that the U.S. military is sending in some three thousand troops to help evacuate much of the U.S. Embassy staff from Kabul. Bitter irony of ironies—that was approximately the number of U.S. troops still deployed in Afghanistan when Biden decided to pull them out and perhaps insure the government falling to the Taliban in the first place.

None of this was a surprise, despite Biden’s embarrassing comment just last month that it was “highly unlikely” the Taliban would soon be “overrunning everything and owning the whole country.” Senior U.S. government officials knew what was coming, even if they hoped for better, or at least for more time until the Taliban onslaught—akin to the “decent interval” Richard Nixon sought between his own withdrawal from Vietnam and the inevitable victory of the North over the South. They were neither “clueless” nor “delusional,” as a person who has recently spoken with Biden’s advisers about Afghanistan put it to me. To those who were paying attention, there was a grim inevitability to the week’s events. The Pentagon has warned every one of the last four Presidents that an abrupt U.S. withdrawal would lead to some version of the Afghan military debacle we are seeing this week.

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Terrible

I hope and pray for the Afghan people. And those poor young women.