Afghanistan: After the Mistakes, Painful Questions Remain

While the decision by U.S. President Joe Biden to pull his troops from Afghanistan may seem legitimate, fears remain regarding what awaits the Afghan people and the Taliban’s close links with al-Qaida.

Almost 20 years ago, as a response to the 9/11 attacks carried out by al-Qaida, the U.S. offered its support to Afghan rebels to topple the Taliban in power at the time. The legitimacy of this policy stemmed from the refusal of the Taliban, despite not having been complicit in the attacks on New York and Washington, to hand over Osama bin Laden and his fighters. This Afghan war lasted from Oct. 7 to Dec. 17, 2001, and ended with the victory of the anti-Taliban forces. The other primordial incentive for the involvement in Afghanistan was to track down al-Qaida’s men. However, after bin Laden fled to Pakistan — where he would be killed 10 years later — on Dec. 16, 2001, no jihadists were remaining in Afghanistan.

Biden, by ordering the military withdrawal from Afghanistan ahead of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, puts an end to a two-fold mistake. On the one hand, the West had no reason to deploy troops in Afghanistan in 2002, the year following the victory of the anti-Taliban forces: There is no need for the military occupation of a country where there is no longer an enemy to fight. On the other hand, the West’s very presence acted as a magnet for the Taliban, who took up arms again and fed an Afghan civil war that was no longer playing out at the end of 2001.

Absolute Horror for the Afghan People

For these reasons, Biden’s decision is difficult to contest. He was, ever since George W. Bush launched into a war in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the third American president to be elected on the promise that he would put an end to the country’s so-called “endless wars.” He is carrying out what first Barack Obama, then Donald Trump both started without seeing it through to completion. He is confirming not only that this war was unwinnable, as the British and the Russian had already observed over the last two centuries, but above all that inserting a foreign military presence into this intra-Afghan strife is entirely unjustified.

Now that the Taliban have conquered Kabul again and are assuming power, only painful questions remain. The main one, of course, is over what will befall the Afghan people, who are about to live for the second time under radical Islamists. We can expect the worst for civilians, women and civil servants, who all spent the last two decades believing in a different country. The previous reign of the Taliban, between 1996 and 2001, was absolute horror for the Afghans.

There is also the issue of the reason behind the international military engagement in 2001: Will the Taliban host al-Qaida again? They committed to the contrary when they negotiated the American forces’ withdrawal with the Trump administration, but to date, they retain a link with the jihadist movement.

Even though the decision by the U.S. can appear legitimate, we can fear a parallel with a situation Biden experienced as Obama’s vice president. After the withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, the Iraqi jihadists regained such momentum that military troops had to be sent back a few years later to fight against Islamic State. There is no doubt that this precedent is at the back of Biden’s mind and that, beyond the spectacular rout of Washington’s Afghan allies, the president must be praying he does not have to send his soldiers back to Afghanistan in a matter of months or years to fight a new generation of international jihadists.