Negotiations meant to reach a stable peace in Afghanistan have collapsed under the Biden Administration into a foreign policy humiliation for the United States. The twenty year American occupation of Afghanistan is ending with continued bloodshed and a Taliban government in Kabul. The implementation of a policy which was intended to end the fighting has given Afghanistan peace on the Taliban’s terms, not Biden’s.
A Taliban peace
The White House hoped that the Afghanistan withdrawal would be seen in the United States as a major foreign policy victory for the new administration.
President Trump had negotiated with the Taliban to secure peace but the credit for actually carrying out these plans would fall to Biden and his people following their confirmation of the withdrawal.
If all had gone according to plan, American media would praise Biden for ending the war in Afghanistan and then the public, which had largely forgotten there was a war, would return to ignoring the country.
If a Taliban takeover had taken months or years this might have all worked out perfectly for Biden. Instead, the country fell in a matter of days and all eyes fell on the White House.
It has become clear in hindsight that the White House knew in advance that the collapse of the Afghan government was extremely likely. The hope was evidently that the Afghans would hold out long enough to make the entire mess someone else’s problem.
Now the United States government has been exposed as both lying to the American people about the likelihood of an Afghan collapse and being horribly incompetent in their own predictions of how long that collapse would take.
Biden kills civilians on the way out
Biden and the Pentagon claim that the United States will be able to maintain a continued counterterrorism ability in Afghanistan without having any presence on the ground.
The world received a taste of what that will look like in a drone strike on August 29 which killed an entire family of Afghan civilians, including young children, in a messy attempt to prevent another terrorist attack.
If this is what the Biden Administration imagines as the future of American in Afghanistan then it is a dismal future for both Afghans and Americans .
The people of Afghanistan clearly want to have a taste of peace after half a century of upheaval . The future that Joe Biden will give them is one of bombs and missiles raining down on their villages and cities so that the White House can claim to be keeping America safe.
It is almost shocking that the Taliban did not respond violently to Biden’s killing of Afghan civilians; the fact that the Kabul evacuation effort was allowed to end peacefully in spite of Biden is a minor miracle for the administration.
If there was ever any chance of peace in Afghanistan it would not have been thanks to the efforts of Joe Biden and his advisors.
