Biden slammed as Taliban abducts 'Lion of Herat' and insurgents encircle Kabul

"Mr. Biden’s precipitous withdrawal, as well as his refusal to offer more meaningful assistance to Afghanistan’s government, risks disaster." - The Washington Post in edit

‘Another Vietnam’, Afghanistan lost ? And where we go from here?

Critics have drawn parallels to US misadventure in Afghanistan to the chaotic fall of Saigon in 1975.

But the US president at the time, Gerald Ford, had been in office for less than a year and is rarely cast by historians as the 'sole' to blame for the tortured US experience in Vietnam.

Joe Biden had cast Afghanistan as a 'costly side issue' when the United States had more challenging task to deal with China.

According to media reports, Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, wondered how Taliban gains would affect Biden's stated mission of defending democracy in the face of authoritarians.

But some say it was still unclear how much of a 'political price' Biden would pay. 

The US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, pushed by Biden, was also popular until of course the rise of the Islamic State extremist movement.

A fresh question in western countries these days is – Was it all for nothing.

Key Afghan cities have fallen at unprecedented and unexpected speed. The international community and especially the US might have been taken by surprise.

Is Afghanistan really lost and has gone the Syria way?

In a complex and challenging situations like in Afghanistan, diplomacy and developmental and humanitarian aid should have triumphed. Instead, the military solution was given an extraordinary weightage. 

 
For many western countries too, the Afghan misadventure has simply boomeranged. 

In Germany, non-state actors have mooted the idea of an independent review to find details of Germany’s ‘most expensive and bloodiest’ battle.

The western forces suffered an estimated 35,000 casualties.

Recognising the former armed groups in Afghanistan and providing them with money and weapons and virtually making them partners was a mistake.

In simple sense, analysts would today say the west; the NATO and the US simply got things wrong. The mistakes started on Oct 7, 2001 when first bombs were dropped!

As a starting point, some are already saying right at the beginning – that is 2001 – the over hasty decision to wage a war in Afghanistan was a mistake. And the timing of the exit was like one of those historical blunders. But yet again, the Biden administration could not have done much.

For America, it is perhaps like another Vietnam.

The Afghan government is deeply divided and also clueless. 

For people of Afghanistan, vis-a-vis the west, there is a sense of betrayal. You came and now leaving us in the mess – seems to be an overwhelming feeling among the people and a considerable section of administration in Afghanistan.

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In several places, they have already started ‘surrendering’.

The Taliban moving towards Kabul is not only a reality, it is advancing on daily basis with major anti-Taliban hubs and cities like Kandahar and Herat falling.

In retrospect, where did things started to go wrong in terms of strategy by the US to chalk out a roadmap for the retreat?

Taliban was taken into confidence and given extra ordinary importance and in the process, the legitimate Afghan government of Ashraf Ghani and the forces, the morale went down. 

The original mission for the US was to eliminate Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. Well, these were achieved.

But most important part of the story today in 2021 is that the ‘establishment’ of an effective Afghan civil society that would banish terror elements and dreaded Taliban (which ruled autocratically between 1996 and 2001) was not achieved.

This was a failure.

It has been reported by AFP, the French news agency, that Andrew Wilder, an Afghanistan expert who visited in June, said the administration could have devoted more time to preparing for the expected effects and that it was not “an orderly and responsible withdrawal”.

“I think it's hard not to conclude that, not the US withdrawal, but the way in which we withdrew had a critical role to play in this,” said Wilder, vice president for Asia studies at the US Institute of Peace.

The US pullout also created “an air of inevitability” that sapped the Afghan will to fight, even if the Taliban remain unpopular.

“To me the psychological factor is what we didn't adequately factor in,” Wilder said.

In a scathing editorial, 'The Washington Post' said that Biden had put at risk the real progress in Afghanistan since 2001 including education for girls, banned by the Taliban when they last ruled.

“Afghan lives ruined or lost will belong to Mr. Biden's legacy just as surely as any US dollars and lives his decision may save,” the newspaper wrote. (AFP)