Afghanistan

The bomb attacks at Kabul airport were what US and allied commanders overseeing the mass evacuation had most feared. In so far as they could be, they were prepared. They had, it appears, received very specific intelligence — perhaps based on a trial run by the bombers — that such attacks were in the offing. They warned people to stay away from the airport. Guards were doubtless on extra-high alert. And yet the perpetrators got through. More than 60 civilians were killed along with 13 US marines. Dozens more were injured and taken to already overburdened hospitals in Kabul. The carnage of 26 August was the costliest day in the last stages of the West’s Afghan war.

America’s frantic, confused exit from Afghanistan was a humiliating shambles even before Thursday's terrorist attack. Now, it is something much worse. It is a deadly tragedy, leaving victims dead and injured and trapping thousands of Americans and friendly Afghans in a lethal environment, where terrorists roam free. There will be a huge political price to pay for this disaster, and President Biden will pay it. This deadly fiasco didn’t just happen on his watch. It happened because of his decisions, a series of fundamentally bad ones, taken by the President himself.

The security services in Britain have been concerned about the rise of the Taliban for many months. In government briefings they have been telling ministers that it was almost inevitable the Taliban would gain some role in the government of Afghanistan once Western forces withdrew – it was just a question of how much. It is easy to ignore, after the sudden collapse of Afghan forces, the fact that the national army had been losing ground to the Taliban over several years and bloody attacks have remained a constant in the centre of major cities in the country. The Taliban killed 16 people and injured 119 in a suicide bomb attack on a residential compound in the capital just days before the leadership was due to meet President Trump at Camp David in September 2019.

President Biden blames Donald Trump and his former secretary of state Mike Pompeo for the debacle of the Afghanistan withdrawal. Mike Pompeo vehemently disagrees. In this exclusive interview with Urs Gehriger of the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche, Pompeo sees America's failure in Afghanistan and its loss of credibility as direct results of Biden’s policies of ‘weakness’ and warns that ‘if the Taliban decide that they're going to become violent in a full-on assault, the US should use every element of its military power to protect American interests.’   Lausanne, Switzerland  Urs Gehriger: President Biden announced that he would withdraw all US military forces by August 31. It looks highly unlikely that this can be accomplished.

This week, the media pressure was on the British government to extend the deadline for the evacuations from Kabul airport. The government had no power to do this unilaterally: it duly asked the United States, and was duly turned down. The issue was almost beside the point. It is doubtful, given the burning desire of so many to leave the country, whether a few more days of rescue flights would have done much to shorten the suffering queue of hopefuls.  Each day is dangerous, so more days are more dangerous. Preoccupation with extension deflected attention from the key point, which is that all evacuation planning assumed that Kabul and its airport would be controlled by the (now former) Afghan government, thereby ensuring an orderly exit.

Fortress Europe is pulling up the drawbridge. The takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban is likely to being about a new wave of refugees heading west, and so walls and fences are being hastily built around the borders of the Schengen Area. As scars inflicted by the last migrant crisis re-open, the possibility of a new influx of refugees is causing deep apprehension throughout the EU. At Usnarz Gorny, on Poland’s border with Belarus, the migrant crisis is already beginning. Twenty four Afghan migrants currently sit stranded in no man’s land between Polish and Belarusian border guards. Left without food or clean drinking water for weeks on end, their situation has become a no-win moral dilemma for the Polish government.

A staple of observing politics is watching rhetoric curdle into reality. Operation Enduring Freedom, thought up and slapped together in the wake of 9/11, was supposed to put down the ‘global terror threat’ and bring freedom to the subjugated peoples of Afghanistan and the Middle East. It ended last week with images of despairing Afghans tumbling to their deaths from the undercarriages of fleeing US planes. The rights and wrongs of leaving are sundering US foreign policy elites, but leaving the United States is most certainly doing. So what next? When the United States high-tails it out of the region you can be sure that everyone around is watching — no more so than in neighbouring Iran. Iran has a peculiar relationship with the Taliban.