Mick Hartley

As Rory Stewart pointed out, it wasn't costing a great deal for the US to stay in Afghanistan. There were just a few thousand US troops there when Biden was elected – yet they made all the difference. On the other hand, nearly eight decades after the Second World War the U.S. still has 50,000 soldiers in Japan, 35,000 in Germany, and 12,000 in Italy. Nearly seven decades after the Korean peninsula was split in two after the UN-authorized intervention, the U.S. still has 26,000 soldiers stationed in South Korea. Withdrawing all of those – with the possible exception of South Korea – wouldn't make a blind bit of difference. But the Afghan troops were the ones that had to go.

Terry Glavin:

In what is widely and reasonably understood to be the worst American foreign-policy humiliation in decades, the catastrophe in Afghanistan seems to have unfolded in a matter of mere days. And from the standpoint of Americans across the political spectrum, the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) appears to have simply run away at the first sight of advancing hooligans.

But anyone paying attention could have seen this coming. The White House was warned. This wasn’t simply an “intelligence failure.” It wasn’t the ANDSF that buckled. It was the United States, and the rest of us. The Americans have been cutting deals with the Taliban behind Afghanistan’s back, then forcing the consequences on the Afghan government, going all the way back to Barack Obama.

For a decade, this is the one consistent message Afghans have been hearing from Washington: you will accommodate the Taliban, you will share power with the Taliban, your embryonic democracy can die in the womb for all we care. Since Biden’s election, the message has been deafening: You will do as you are told, and you will have it done by the end of August.

The ANDSF was left with nothing to fight for….

And now, it’s all over but the terror. After having been driven back into Pakistan’s tribal belt 20 years ago following the atrocities of 9/11, the Taliban are back in power. The same jihadist theocrats who had turned Afghanistan into a bleak slave state and a staging ground for global terror groups, including al-Qaida, have settled into the Arg, the presidential palace in Kabul….

Terrorized and abused all these years, their journalists, judges, professors, civil society activists and even their comedians murdered in a Taliban assassination campaign that the “peace talks” farce allowed to go into hyperdrive, Afghans were resigned to some sort of negotiations with the Taliban — so long as the Taliban first put down their guns — long before Joe Biden came along.

While generally conservative in their Muslim faith, Afghans have consistently demonstrated in poll after poll that they want nothing to do with the pathological pseudo-theology the Taliban continue to enforce wherever they gain ground. The latest Asia Foundation polling shows that 82 per cent of Afghans say they have “no sympathy” whatsoever for the Taliban. Seven in 10 Afghans say women should be allowed to work outside the home, and 84 per cent say women should have equal opportunities in education.

It has been a desperate and difficult struggle over the past 20 years, but Afghans had built the basis for an Islamic democracy, with women holding senior positions in government, and holding dozens of positions in elected office. Nine million of Afghanistan’s 11 million children are attending school. It’s a country of about 38 million people. Their median age is 19.

For all the American hand wringing and whining, there were only about 2,400 U.S. troops in Afghanistan when Biden was elected — about a third the total NATO troop contribution….

Afghans cannot be blamed for the terrifying darkness that has been allowed to fall on their country again. This is not what they wanted. Whether the liberal democracies of the “west” will ever be capable of admitting it or not, the catastrophe of these past few days in Afghanistan is what “we” wanted.

And one way or another, we will all be made to pay.

The reason that the US intervened in Afghanistan twenty years back was to overthrow the Taliban and their medieval terrorist-enabling regime. Now that they're back in power the only way this can be viewed is as a humiliating defeat for the US, and for the West. And this time the Taliban will have the support not only of neighbouring Pakistan, but of China too:

A day after the U.S.-backed president, Ashraf Ghani, fled the country, China extended an official welcome to Afghanistan’s new Taliban rulers. “China respects the right of the Afghan people to independently determine their own destiny and is willing to continue to develop … friendly and cooperative relations with Afghanistan,” Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying was quoted as saying. As the United States undertakes frantic efforts to evacuate remaining personnel from Afghanistan, the Taliban is taking early steps to normalize relations with key regional powers. This is the second time that the fundamentalist Islamist group has ruled Afghanistan, after an earlier government in power from 1996 to 2001 was deposed by the U.S. invasion. Retired U.S. diplomat Alberto Fernandez notes that the Taliban today “are likely to be far less isolated than they were in 1996-2001, when they were recognized by just three countries. If they play their cards right, they will likely have productive relations with China, Turkey, Iran, Qatar, and Azerbaijan, in addition to their patron Pakistan. Russia and the Central Asian states are wary but also likely to look for a modus vivendi with Taliban-ruled Kabul.”