In the end, it was a whimper. All that talk about the Afghanistan government putting up a credible fight to the Taliban crumbled, as the jihadi militia sauntered into Mazar-i-Sharif and then into the presidential palace in Kabul, snatching power with the ease of snatching candy from a child. President Ashraf Ghani and his core team have fled Afghanistan, allegedly with bags full of dollar bills. Several “legendary” warlords such as Abdul Rashid Dostum and company, who were claiming that they would not go down without a fight, have left too, without putting up even a semblance of a fight. And all this without a thought for their people, thousands of whom are rushing to the airport in Kabul hoping to catch a non-existent flight to safety, and dying in the process. Apart from the millions who are now quaking, wondering what fate befalls them next, even as the Taliban raid the homes of those perceived to be with the enemy. The US has brought in around 3,000 soldiers, but only to protect the airport from where they are evacuating their own citizens, while exchanging gunfire with the Taliban. There is no government, no United Nations, no superpower to protect the Afghans. Afghanistan has been left to its own fate. The journey from here will possibly take it back several centuries as a medieval force returns to rule it.
Amid this, even among US’ friends and allies, its reputation as the world’s leading superpower is in tatters. The trust in its ability to lead or be a reliable ally has taken a hit. President Joe Biden’s foreign policy goal of stitching an alliance to counter the Chinese dragon has started looking shaky, for trust is the bedrock on which alliances are built. This may have larger geopolitical ramifications, especially for the Quad.
It is not the decision to pull out of Afghanistan that rankles—because that is a US domestic political compulsion—but the way the pullout happened, where both Donald Trump and Joe Biden chose to be led up the garden path by the Taliban and Pakistan. The operative word here is “chose”. The flawed “peace” agreement that Trump had struck with the Taliban in February 2020 ensured the release of 5,000 hardened Taliban fighters, as a precondition for negotiations to start. These fighters added heft to the ranks of the militia and emboldened them. The Taliban never intended to share power with Ashraf Ghani’s government, or any other democratically elected government. It was never about an Afghan-led, Afghan-owned peace process, but a Taliban-led, Taliban-owned government, an Islamic emirate backed by Pakistan and China. Worse, it was there for all—except, we have to believe, the Americans!—to see from the Taliban’s military campaign to capture territory. Even when the Taliban leadership was assuring the US that they would not take any big city forcibly, that’s what exactly they were doing.
Even until July, President Biden was intoning how the Afghan forces outnumbered the Taliban and would fight for themselves and their country once the US troops pullout happened. Was it intelligence failure about the Taliban’s preparedness and the nature of training and backing that they were receiving from the Pakistani military establishment that made him issue such statements? How did some US “experts” arrive at the assessment that Kabul could resist a Taliban assault for weeks, with some reports mentioning even 90 days? Why wasn’t air support provided to the Afghan forces to cut off the Taliban’s supply lines from Pakistan? Why isn’t Pakistan finding any mention in the current discourse on the Taliban? Why hasn’t there been talk of sanctioning Pakistan when GHQ Rawalpindi’s hand behind the Taliban is as clear as daylight? Why did President Biden ignore his top generals who advised retaining at least 2,500 soldiers in Afghanistan even when negotiations for a settled peace were going on? What happens next when the “out-of-work” terrorists in the Taliban ranks are made to turn their attention to the rest of the world, including India and the US? What did the US achieve by sacrificing so many of its own soldiers in Afghanistan? What is the US legacy in Afghanistan after two decades—a country full of embittered and disillusioned people? The questions are many, but answers are scarce.
End of the day, the world’s number one superpower is finding it difficult to evacuate even its embassy staff from Kabul at the time of writing. How clueless does President Biden’s government appear in all this, how uninformed! Sadly, that’s the image the world will remember.