Afghanistan

Tuesday

Dalibor Rohac

The EU shares in Biden’s shame over Afghanistan

From our UK edition

Among America’s self-described foreign policy ‘realists,’ there is a common trope according to which the best way for the United States to get its allies to do more is to show them some tough love – particularly by doing less. That theory has just been put to a test in Afghanistan. It has failed spectacularly. Contrary to the caricature of the protracted conflict in Afghanistan as a distinctly American endeavour, both the combat operations and the efforts at reconstruction were supported by an extraordinarily diverse coalition of countries, from New Zealand, through much of Europe, to Turkey. Of some 150,000 British troops who served in Afghanistan during the past two decades, almost 500 were killed and 2,000 wounded.

Qanta Ahmed

A new world order will emerge from America’s humiliation

From our UK edition

When America decided to save Afghanistan from the tyranny of the Taliban, it acted on two major beliefs. The first was that the US had the might, the tech and the ability to reshape Afghanistan — what could a superpower have to fear from a ragtag bunch of insurgents? — the second was a belief that this Kabul project was not about colonialism. History was moving America’s way and all it needed was a nudge. Both theories have now been tested to destruction. The humiliation that America has just inflicted upon herself (and her western allies) will reverberate globally and in a way that emboldens all the wrong people. To leave Kabul in such an undignified and callous manner is a victory not only for the Taliban but for both Russia and China.

Monday

Roger Kimball

Joe Biden’s short walk in the Hindu Kush

'There is no light in the bazaar. The Americans brought the light when they came to build the great dam . . . but when they left the took the machine with them and now there is no more light.’ — Eric Newby, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush There really isn’t much that is amusing about Afghanistan. There never has been. But Eric Newby wrote a most amusing book about his trek through the Hindu Kush in the late 1950s. These days, when the Americans decamp from Afghanistan they leave behind tons — literally tons — of lights, not to mention munitions of various sizes and lethality, roads, buildings, communication devices of all sorts — you name it. A few days ago, we were told that the Afghan government might fall within 90 days to the newly resurgent Taliban.

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Amber Duke

Biden gave the right speech at the wrong time

This evening, President Joe Biden finally addressed the American people from the White House on Monday after Afghanistan fell into the hands of the Taliban. The speech should have been given much sooner. We did not hear publicly from the President for three days as the Taliban seized Kabul, the US Embassy was evacuated, and Afghani president Ashraf Ghani fled the country. Biden finally left Camp David for the White House on Monday morning amid mounting pressure. He did not take questions from the press and will return to Camp David on Monday evening. Trotting out the President for a 10-minute scripted speech and then sending him back on vacation doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the commander-in-chief.

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Jacob Heilbrunn

Biden embraces his inner realist

It’s starting to look as though President Joe Biden really does want to leave Afghanistan. In his speech today, Biden didn’t concede that he has blundered in ordering a pullout. On the contrary, he doubled down. The result was the most forceful, impassioned and persuasive speech of his young presidency. In essence Biden embraced the original Rumsfeld doctrine — conduct limited counter-terrorism strikes but don’t get stuck nation-building. Adopting a different course was the original sin of the George W. Bush administration, which became bogged down in Afghanistan as it prepared for war in Iraq. Now Biden is finally issuing a course correction. Any notion that Biden is senescent, a puppet of his advisers, or just plain loopy should be dispelled by his steely performance.

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Amber Duke

Biden snoozed while Kabul fell

The United States is in the midst of a foreign policy disaster, and the President has not been seen publicly in three days. He will give a speech at 3:45 Eastern Time, but this latest crisis has proved that 'Sleepy Joe' is more than just a cruel Trumpist moniker. It's alarmingly accurate. America needs a world leader, not someone who balks at cutting short his 'August vacation.' Biden was last seen at the White House on Thursday morning when he gave a speech on prescription drug prices. He ignored shouted questions afterward about the unfolding situation in Afghanistan, where the Taliban was quickly capturing city after city. Instead of canceling his weekend trip, Biden headed to his home in Wilmington, Delaware.

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Kate Andrews

Biden risks undermining America’s moral authority

From our UK edition

Joe Biden is facing what will likely be the defining event of his presidency. The gains made in Afghanistan are evaporating in record time under his watch. But Biden doesn't want to be a foreign policy president. He wants to be the man who ended wars, taking credit for America’s Covid recovery, funnelling trillions of dollars into infrastructure and education while the Federal Reserve’s printing presses are warmed up and there's still appetite to spend. But like his Democrat predecessor — and the man whom he served as vice president — he has been dealt a different hand. President Obama was loath to see the atrocities taking place in Syria distract from his domestic agenda (which he wanted to be defined by healthcare reform).

Steerpike

The nine worst responses to Afghanistan’s fall

From our UK edition

The fall of Afghanistan has provoked much comment and soul-searching on both sides of the Atlantic. Along with the usual talking heads and thumping op-eds, the Taliban's imminent victory has prompted some truly awful takes from some of the less distinguished figures in public life. Below is Mr Steerpike's guide to some of the most tone-deaf, stunningly crass and just plain sinister responses to the fall of Afghanistan. Stop the War Coalition and Richard Burgon Straight out the blocks with a statement was the hard left Stop the War Coalition, formerly chaired by one Jeremy Corbyn. The group has claimed the withdrawal from Afghanistan as vindication for its cause and called for the British government to give reparations to the Taliban. Talk about living down to expectations.

Isabel Hardman

How MPs can make the Afghanistan debate matter

From our UK edition

It is very easy to dismiss Wednesday’s recall of Parliament as a pointless exercise in handwringing that sums up the way most MPs approach foreign policy. There will certainly be plenty of frustrating hindsight on offer from politicians who haven’t taken a blind bit of notice of Afghanistan right up until the point where they scent an opportunity to bash the government. But there are also important questions to be answered that cannot wait for the normal return of the Commons in September. The first is whether there is any likelihood of British and NATO troops returning to the country.

Mary Dejevsky

The real reason Biden was prepared to let Kabul fall

From our UK edition

The speed of the Taliban’s advance, culminating in Sunday’s capture of Kabul, has been widely put forward as proof that Joe Biden was wrong: that his decision to end the 20 year-old Afghan mission was a historic mistake that will blight his presidency. For all that, as he himself has said, he was the fourth president to preside over the war and he would not hand it over to a fifth, he could go down only as the president who lost Afghanistan. Maybe. But is this really how the United States — and allied — flight from Afghanistan will be seen with the benefit of even a little hindsight? Much, of course, depends on what happens next. How much bloodshed accompanies the Taliban takeover.

Katy Balls

Boris faces a backlash from Tory MPs over Afghanistan

From our UK edition

After the Taliban took over Kabul and announced victory in Afghanistan, a scramble is underway by diplomats and many Afghans to flee the country. There are videos overnight of distressing scenes at Kabul airport where crowds have assembled in an attempt to get out. The US embassy has since issued an advisory to American citizens and Afghan nationals not to travel to the airport until notified. As the chaos unfolds – and both UK and US estimates on the likely speed of the Taliban advance prove embarrassingly wide of the mark – anger is building among MPs over the government's handling of the situation. Dominic Raab has flown back from his holiday early and Parliament will sit on Wednesday for an emergency session to debate the next move.

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Daniel McCarthy

The American epoch of failure 

For 20 years America built a Potemkin village and called it Afghanistan. Now this cardboard democracy has been trampled down in a matter of days by the Taliban. The speed and comprehensiveness of the rout cannot be explained by Joe Biden’s blunders. The war has drawn to a humiliating end not because of a weak president’s missteps in the final weeks but because the entire project was misconceived. Afghanistan was not ready for democracy and trillions of dollars in American aid could not even begin to change that fact. With US and allied forces providing security, the Afghan government did not even have to fulfill the most basic function of any state. The Afghan government lived off charity — foreign money, foreign arms.

Sunday

Harry Shukman

‘Bit of a pickle’ — meet the British student stuck on vacation in Kabul

If a friend told you he booked a vacation to ‘goof off and soak in the sun’, you would be forgiven for thinking he had opted for a week on the Costa del Sol. Miles Routledge seems to be a bit different. He’d seen news reports stating that, while the Taliban were making inexorable progress through Afghanistan, it would be months before they seized Kabul. So off he went. Late last week, he was strolling through the bazaars like a typical Brit abroad, snapping pictures of exotic dishes and posting updates on Facebook about the inferior quality of Afghan plumbing. It was just two days into his trip, after the Taliban had marched into the capital and flights out of the city had been canceled, that Routledge, 22, wrote on Facebook: ‘I’m stuck in Afghanistan. Bit of a pickle.

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James Forsyth

Our moral obligation to the Afghans who took us at our word

From our UK edition

The speed of the Taliban’s advance in Afghanistan is remarkable. Even those who thought that the Trump / Biden policy of withdrawal was a folly, did not expect that Kabul would be surrounded before the end of August. Their only mistake was to believe our assurances about having an enduring commitment to the country What makes the whole situation, with all the suffering that ordinary Afghans will endure and the damage being done to the US’s reputation for being a reliable ally, so exasperating is that after years of failure the US and Nato had found a relatively low cost way of maintaining a form of stability in the country.

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Freddy Gray

Wrong then, wrong now — Joe Biden’s maddeningly inconsistent foreign policy

‘After al-Qaeda and the Taliban fall...when we "drain the swamp", as the President says, the medium-term goal is to roll up all al-Qaeda cells around the world. Then, with the help of other nations and possibly the ultimate sanction of the United Nations our hope is that we will see a relatively stable government in Afghanistan, one that does not harbor terrorists, is acceptable to the major players in the region, represents the ethnic make up of the country and provides the foundation for future reconstruction of that country.’ So said Sen. Joe Biden, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, on October 22, 2001, as America invaded Afghanistan. ‘The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.

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Andrew Bacevich

Autopsy of a failed war

‘Your country just betrayed us.’ So Haji Sakhi, a resident of Kabul, recently remarked to a New York Times reporter. ‘Look at what they brought on us,’ the 68-year-old Afghan continued. ‘They lost the war and just fled the country.’ His they refers to us — the United States of America. Haji Sakhi’s unsparing judgment deserves sober consideration. Kabul is about to fall to the Taliban, faster than even the most gloomy experts predicted. Our nation’s ‘longest war’ is now ending in abject failure. How are Americans — at least those few of us who attend to such matters — to apportion responsibility for the outcome? Who or what is to blame for ‘losing’ Afghanistan? Was it ever ours to lose in the first place?

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David Loyn

What went wrong in Afghanistan

The collapse of the Afghan armed forces this week, far quicker than anyone expected, has revealed the depth of the corruption that has hollowed out the Afghan state, including, as it turned out, the military. On paper Afghanistan had 300,000 troops and paramilitary police, and 30,000 special forces – more than enough to secure the country against an insurgency if skillfully deployed and well motivated. The best of these troops are as good as any in the region. But they were strung out in thousands of checkpoints across the country, poorly fed, rarely paid, and with fuel and ammunition sold off before it reached them. Many of the units were composed of ‘ghost soldiers,’ phantom troops whose pay was collected by senior officers.

Friday

James Kirkup

Where is Britain’s anger about Afghanistan?

From our UK edition

This is an age of anger. Social media amplifies rage and exaggerates polarisation. Twitter isn’t Britain, but too many people in politics and journalism spend too much time on the site and – consciously or not – start to mistake its shallow extremes for real public opinion. The result is a public discourse more often driven by fury than understanding. Just about any question or issue can unleash this lab cultured rage. Some people are angry about being asked to wear a mask to avoid spreading a disease that might kill someone else. Some people are angry about an alpaca. So where’s the anger about Afghanistan? A Suez moment is passing almost unremarked Afghanistan, where two decades of Western intervention is ending in bloody failure.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Afghanistan will be a stain on the Biden presidency

From our UK edition

Afghanistan will be a stain on the Biden presidency. His decision to continue with a US withdrawal from the country – he wants America out by the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks – reflects both the war-weariness of Washington and how Afghanistan and the ‘war on terror’ have dropped down the country's list of strategic priorities. The consequences of the US withdrawal are all too apparent, with the Taliban now in control of two thirds of Aghanistan. American intelligence is worried that Kabul might fall within a month. In an awful historical irony, the Taliban could once more be in control of the Afghan capital by 11 September.

Wednesday

Stephen Arnell

Afghanistan on screen: 10 films about the conflict

From our UK edition

As US forces pull out from the nation’s longest running war, a look at some of the most thought-provoking films dealing with the Afghan conflict. Unlike Vietnam, when mainstream movies about the war (Platoon, Born on the 4th of July, Rambo etc) really only caught on around 10 years after the fall of Saigon (April 1975), motion pictures set in Afghanistan were put into production relatively shortly after the struggle began. Few (with one notable exception) really set the box office alight, the subject probably remaining too raw for audiences to regard as suitable popcorn fare. It’s interesting to note that some of the Afghan wars prior to the ongoing insurgency have also featured in motion pictures.