Successive US presidents have grappled with the task of ending America’s war in Afghanistan without a repeat of the humiliating scenes that marked its final capitulation in Vietnam. Unlike Saigon 1975, there will be no desperate helicopter flights from the embassy roof when the last US troops pull out on September 11.
The air of failure and the colossal waste of human life will linger, however. For most of Afghanistan’s 39 million people, the US withdrawal will only heighten dread of what will follow.
The Taliban have outlasted western firepower over two decades of bloody conflict. With President Biden confirming an unconditional withdrawal, the insurgents have now outlasted the US at the negotiating table too.
Since joining the US-brokered peace talks in Qatar last year, the Taliban have conceded nothing. Conscious of Washington’s desperation for a fig leaf to justify its departure, the Taliban have played along, pledging to sever ties with al-Qaeda and disavowing its barbaric treatment of women during the Islamist government of the 1990s.
On the ground, however, the Taliban are laying the ground for a return to power. Western intelligence agencies report that al-Qaeda remains embedded with the insurgents. Girls’ schools have been bombed in Taliban-held areas.
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A vicious wave of murders targeting journalists, judges, civil servants, scholars and rights activists has left scores dead, terrorising Afghanistan’s educated classes. Over recent weeks, the militants have turned on professional women. Two female Supreme Court judges were slain in Kabul in January, and three journalists were shot dead in Jalalabad last month, the killings calculated to terrorise women out of the workplace.
Thousands of Afghans have already gone into hiding or are seeking to flee the country. Long before the last American troops leave, the progressive elements of Afghan society who had taken tentative root despite the conflict and who represented the country’s best hope for a brighter future are being hollowed out and massacred. With victory at hand, the Taliban have set about eradicating Afghanistan’s civil society and institutions, which impede their path to restoring the brutal Islamic emirate that was routed in 2001.
As the violence mounts, and with the insurgents refusing to honour the peace process with even a token ceasefire, an embittered Afghan government has been pressured by Washington to concede more and more ground. President Ghani’s government is corrupt and incompetent, his two election victories marred by allegations of fraud. But reports of Washington leaning on Afghanistan’s elected leader to step down from office or bend to sharing power with militants who refuse to lay down their arms risks fatally undermining the country’s flawed but fledgling democracy, and with it America’s legacy.
President Biden had no good options in Afghanistan, after inheriting the bargain struck with the Taliban by the Trump administration last year, which set the timetable for a final American withdrawal. After a brief and fitful diplomatic effort, however, the opportunity to walk away from Afghanistan has proved too tempting to resist.
For ordinary Afghans and their benighted country, shattered by 40 years of conflict, a new nightmare beckons. Afghanistan’s fragile political, social and economic progress, fought for over two decades and paid for with the blood of more than 300,000 civilian lives and some 3,500 US and Nato troops since 2001, now faces being wiped out. The terrifying spectre of another collapse into civil war, with jihadist groups again massing in the shadows, looms in Afghanistan once more.