Disarmament

Half the world is outraged at President Joe Biden. The new American president is blamed for both Thursday’s attack in Kabul that claimed over a hundred lives and NATO’s disgraceful withdrawal from Afghanistan. Even though NATO has 30 member nations, so far none have spoken out regarding the military presence in Afghanistan. Every member nation took part in creating and training the disgustingly cowardly Afghan forces, which handed the country to the Taliban without a fight, as well as the secular government and administration.

They are our failure too, not just the Americans’, and especially not Biden’s. No one protested when President Donald Trump sat his administration in front of a negotiating table with the Taliban, bypassing the representatives of the Afghan government and military that had stood tall and trained for almost 20 years with serious American material expenditures. Nor did anyone protest when Trump set the withdrawal date for May of this year.

Biden was already in a difficult position because of the lightning-fast Taliban takeover and the chaos surrounding the withdrawal, but until Thursday’s suicide bombings, he could have argued that the situation did not claim American lives. However, the deaths of 13 American soldiers have created a new situation, and it’s frightening that it will divert our attention away from the point. And for the future of international action against terrorism, these questions are not beside the point: How do we deal with the Taliban, and can we recognize the government of a terrorist group that we have fought against for two decades (which is now building a 21st century society that is more deprived of rights than in the darkest Middle Ages)?

Trump made a terrorist group a negotiating partner. The rival Islamic State’s bombing of Kabul’s airport made victims of the Taliban, too. Now the only question is whether they remain in the doghouse or enter the civilized world unconditionally. If so, the West will have surrendered to the Islamists.