Two years after that dishonorable US evacuation that seriously damaged Washington’s position and reputation internationally due to the Biden administration’s lack of accountability and poor decision-making. The apartheid practiced by the fundamentalist Taliban group in these two years has wiped out the rights of Afghan women and girls, who have not only been victims of invisibility behind the burqa, but have also lost the opportunity to attend local schools and universities. However, in the face of these disasters, the Biden administration remains silent in a position of appeasement.
Meanwhile, the rights of Afghan women and girls have been completely abolished in proportion to the fundamentalist group’s growth in drug trafficking, which has become one of Europe’s largest opium suppliers.
Still, the Biden administration is holding diplomatic meetings with the Taliban to normalize ties with the group while sending millions of dollars in humanitarian aid using American taxpayer dollars. While officials at the current government’s State Department have released an unrealistic report praising the success of the intervention and disengagement while blaming others and absolving themselves of all responsibility.
The truth is that the State Department’s review of military intervention in Afghanistan contains a number of omissions and half-truths, most notably the lack of a seriously defined policy on Afghanistan since the Biden administration took office.
Both the document and the current meetings between the government and the Taliban are a message that does not do justice to current reality. The report insists and confirms the statement that the evacuation was successful. However, it presents a number of elements designed to justify the government’s efforts towards the Afghans, which it describes as “relentless”, but fails to take into account the reality and the fact that thousands of citizens have had to leave the country due to the crisis Taliban violence since the US withdrawal.
Contrasting with the armed forces’ respectful history of their veterans and those killed in action, it makes a fleeting mention of the thirteen US soldiers killed in Taliban airport attacks on August 26, 2021, representing the highest number of soldiers killed in Afghanistan at a single time day in ten years of military intervention, ignoring intelligence failures and blunders in Kabul and in pre-departure meetings in Doha that put these men in mortal danger ahead of the wave of Taliban motorcycle bombing.
It is true that in August 2021 – the month of the armed forces withdrawal – Congress attempted to conduct an inquiry into these facts and the responsibilities of decision-making, but this inquiry was unsuccessful and was bureaucratically neutralized by the government itself. However, it was not sufficiently cooperative and even restricted members of Congress from access to various information, documents and communications, on the grounds that everything was a file of classified military information.
In order to get answers about the death of the thirteen military personnel at Kabul airport a few hours before the complete evacuation of Afghanistan, the relatives of the dead have sent several petitions to members of the House of Representatives, promising them information and a re-investigation of the facts to ease the pain of the relatives to alleviate the dead soldiers. Families are demanding answers they never received from the administration.
Much like the events in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, when the US consulate in Libya was captured and burned by fundamentalists who murdered two guards and Ambassador Christopher Stevens was kidnapped and later assassinated, the Biden administration appears determined to end the Hide responsibility without learning from these lessons. In both cases, the published reports only provide excuses, but do not identify the root causes of the failure or suggest measures to help prevent a recurrence.
In the Afghan case, the government’s apology refers to coordination problems between the political and military leadership in carrying out the final evacuation of troops and civilian personnel. Even the report blames the American civilians themselves, who chose to stay or travel to Afghanistan despite State Department warnings. Most astonishingly, however, the Biden administration emphasizes that although the analysis was flawed, no one could have prevented the speed with which the Taliban would seize power in the face of the collapse of the Afghan government, its military and security forces, and the intelligence officers were very unprofessional . But much more scandalous is the blame given to officials and citizens for taking risks when in fact they offered to help with the evacuation.
During those two weeks, many foreign service officials worked around the clock—some even longer—professionally and tirelessly, performing their duties competently. Therefore, it is inconceivable for the families of the soldiers killed in the evacuation that the political leadership would make such wrong decisions by giving poor instructions to the officers who privately and voluntarily tried to evacuate thousands of people, thereby saving hundreds of lives , including Afghan citizens. . In many cases, these efforts represent a fact that should have been recognized and not played down and criticized.
The fact is that President Biden and his national security team, including Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, have come under fire from various quarters for willfully ignoring government-qualified advice from their military chiefs, Afghan government officials, and representatives of human rights organizations. The result was a grave one and costly failure.
Like what happened in Vietnam, the ramifications of the disorderly disengagement from Afghanistan, despite the years, remain the focus of negative criticism for both President Biden and the credibility of the United States today, and although time ticks by. Afghanistan will surely be the most tragic legacy of the Biden administration’s counter-terrorism foreign policy over the years in its long list of failures.
