Western Responsibility for the Afghan Disaster

“The horror of the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan is above all the result of a multitude of serious mistakes attributable to Western governments,” said Sylvain Foulquier. “[…] Salafists and Islamists are strong only because today’s Western world is weak.”

We are living in one of the darkest pages of human history: a kind of Century of Darkness, the perfect antithesis of the Age of Enlightenment. The horror of the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan is above all the result of a multitude of serious mistakes attributable to Western governments, particularly Anglo-Saxon governments.

It all really started during the 1979-1989 war in Afghanistan between the USSR and the mujahedeen. We may recall in passing that the Red Army had intervened in this country only at the request of the local government (just as France did in Mali) to fight against jihadist fascism, and that it was the North Americans (as well as some European countries) who then armed and financed the Taliban — whose criminal nature was already known.

The USSR’s defeat was therefore a disaster in which only fools can rejoice. Western leaders were and continue to be among the most irresponsible in the world: We saw it with Donald Trump abandoning the Kurds to their sad fate, and then with Joe Biden deciding to withdraw his troops from Afghanistan — two examples among an infinity of others.

Let us add that the Taliban are no different from the fanatics of Hamas and Hezbollah, who continue to enjoy great complacency in Europe against a backdrop of totally uninhibited antisemitism, or from some well-established Salafist imams in France, England or Belgium.

Salafists and Islamists are strong only because today’s Western world is weak. For decades, the very few intellectuals present in the public arena (Boualem Sansal, Georges Bensoussan, Céline Pina, etc.) have been trying to sound the alarm, without ever being listened to by the different powers in place. And the result is here before our very eyes, frightening and sinister.