Immediately following a withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, the Taliban has just as hastily reclaimed its control of the country. Amidst the chaos and violence that have defined the collapse of the Afghan state, the Biden Administration has maintained its firm stance that Afghanistan must fight for itself.
With the timeline of events that very explicitly lays out a cause and effect scenario between Joe Biden’s withdrawal of troops and the Taliban’s advance, it is easy to point an accusing finger at Biden and his administration. On the other hand, the removal of Americans from the scene has exposed the fact that hardly anything has changed in Afghan dynamics since before 2001. Unless Western efforts became a permanent feature, the fall of the Afghan government was nearly inevitable. This dichotomy presents two unfortunately valid sides of the situation. It also displays the range of policies that have been available to American presidents. Obama’s policies, and possibly even Trump’s, stood in the middle of that range. Neither administration was willing to invest all of Washington’s efforts, nor were they willing to forego America’s culture of interference. From the Obama Administration on, the deployment of American forces in Afghanistan has been relatively small, albeit sustained, with lessening casualties. Washington D.C.’s conversations about Biden’s policies and their fallout are, for the most part, not going to call for perpetual war and the squashing of the Taliban. It has long been an understanding that the war is unwinnable. Rather, the critique will be of the haste and thoughtlessness with which a small-medium presence with enormous significance was removed.
To entirely blame Biden, however, would also be wrong. The withdrawal of American troops is not quite his own doing. The agreement with the Taliban in which the U.S. agreed to remove all military presence was signed during the Trump administration. With this being said, the process should have been coordinated with more conscience of the situation at hand.
As for Biden’s attitude towards Afghanistan, which has seemed to be one of annoyance, criticism is more than warranted. Exasperation with Afghans for not standing up for themselves is an outrageous sentiment on Biden’s part. American decision-makers have had their share of justified frustrations with the Kabul government over the past couple of decades. And the tumultuousness of those years is not all to America’s credit. However, the notion that the Afghan people have been negligent or failed to shoulder responsibility is preposterous. At this point in time, Afghanistan has endured generation upon generation of war and humanitarian crises, almost none of which were spurred by an internal crisis that the rest of the international community got sucked into. That is the key piece of information that Biden and many other Americans seem to have forgotten. The situation in Afghanistan was triggered by the repeated insertion of outside turmoil. Since the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion, Afghanistan has existed as a sort of communal battleground for regional and global powers to vie for their security and self-interest at the expense of Afghanistan’s stability. The U.S. has held a decades-long presence, the CIA virtually created and funded the Taliban as part of its own anti-Communism agenda, Pakistan has actively supported the mujahideen and Taliban, and more. In light of all those decades of history, blaming Afghans for the success of the Taliban is blatantly wrong. The rest of the world has not allowed Afghanistan to recuperate as a normally functioning state.
This is not in any way an argument in favor of American occupation in Afghanistan, or the Middle East at all for that matter. The U.S.’s presence was a direct manifestation of its imperialist agenda. With all due acknowledgment of the Taliban’s vileness and the damage that it has inflicted on the Afghan people, it is important to not confuse fear of the Taliban and fear of a loss of imperialism. This is something that has all too often been done in America’s recent history. It would be wildly incorrect to suggest that the U.S.’s presence brought about a net positive for the Afghan people. During the occupation, there was some notable progress made regarding the rights and freedoms of women. However, Human Rights Watch has astutely pointed out that any progress made took place against a backdrop of atrocious violence and abuse of the Afghans. U.S.-backed militias committed a slew of human rights abuses that ultimately outweighed fragile social progression. And American interference structurally impaired Afghanistan’s ability to function as a self-sufficient state. American occupation, more often than not, does not solve problems as much as it creates them.
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