It’s hard to believe it can get worse, and yet each day since the United States withdrawal from Afghanistan, that country seems to descend even deeper into hell. In a matter of weeks, the country fell city by city into Taliban hands while President Joe Biden and his administration stuck their heads in the sand and pretended that they hadn’t just initiated one of the most historic foreign policy failures in decades. Not only are the people of Afghanistan paying the price, but the US is now, too.
It’s not that leaving Afghanistan itself is the problem. It’s how this administration did it, seemingly without a care in the world for the people of Afghanistan, nor the 18 million Afghan women who the US just threw under the bus. This was a completely avoidable tragedy that Biden couldn’t be bothered to prevent because his administration does not care about the people of Afghanistan or the women of Afghanistan or any other “undesirables.”
The irony of this, of course, is that it is Biden’s party parading around pretending they are a progressive party of human rights and women’s rights. However, taking a stand against the Taliban isn’t on their human rights agenda; in fact, the Biden administration and many Democratic officials have doubled down and done the opposite, defending Biden’s imbecilic decision while Afghan women and children literally languish in sewage outside the airport in Kabul. And let’s not forget also that American citizens and Afghan contractors who have helped American troops while in Afghanistan remain stranded on the ground with this feckless administration doing nothing to help.
From day one, the Taliban’s narrative was to violently take over city after city to humiliate the US, while the Biden administration’s narrative was first that this “wouldn’t happen” and later, whitewashing the Taliban to present them as if they had somehow reformed. Yet every day, the Taliban is proving the Biden Administration wrong and making a laughingstock of his administration and by extension, the country.
Instead of ensuring safe passage for Americans and their allies in Afghanistan before a hasty withdrawal, the US betrayed its own citizens and allies on the ground – including by literally handing the Taliban a list of Americans and those who worked with them, supposedly an “evacuation” list. The extraordinary stupidity of this move is likely unprecedented in American foreign policy history.
So nobody, except Biden’s people perhaps, is shocked to learn that the Taliban is giving Americans and allies a “hard time” getting to the airport, and there are already reports of Taliban fighters going door to door looking for Afghan collaborators who assisted the US. If all that wasn’t enough, the American withdrawal literally armed the Taliban by leaving thousands of guns, “2,000 armored vehicles, and up to 40 aircraft potentially including UH-60 Black Hawks, scout attack helicopters, and ScanEagle military drones,” according to Reuters.
Yet even after the embarrassment of having to airlift the entire US embassy staff in Kabul from the roof, with all the imagery and shades of Saigon that engendered, the Biden Administration continues to defend this colossal mistake. Not long after the Taliban took complete control of Afghanistan, White House press secretary Jen Psaki absurdly claimed that no Americans were stranded there, a blatantly false statement that led to many journalists publicly calling her out. Only days later, Psaki continued defending the decision and claimed the US has a “common purpose” with the Taliban, the day after an ISIS suicide bomb killed 13 US troops and over 90 Afghans. After the terrorist attack, Biden himself pledged to make the terrorists “pay” – yet in the exact same speech, he pledged to continue the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and has even committed to withdrawing by the August 31 deadline he set, whether or not American citizens and allies get out.
The American lack of concern for what happens after the US evacuates obviously extends to Afghans as well, who will be impacted more than anyone else. When the Taliban took control of Kabul, they promised that women would have rights and education “within Sharia law” – yet only hours later, a woman was shot for not wearing a hijab. Even before the Taliban took Kabul, there were reports of the Taliban demanding cities turn over lists of all their unmarried girls and women in order to be married off to Taliban fighters. Women have already been fired from their places of work, and have disappeared within days from public life. Some 20 years of progress for 18 million Afghan women, gone in an instant because of a lack of foresight and planning from the president of the United States.
Despite the fantastical thinking from the Biden administration and the pleas of US allies not to withdraw from Afghanistan by August 31, and the desperation of Afghans to escape from the grip of the Taliban to the point they’re hanging on to planes as they take off and throwing their babies over the airport barriers – tragically, Afghanistan will likely continue its descent into chaos. Perhaps the most sickening thing of all this mess is the US leadership’s hypocrisy and utter lack of moral concern for the people of Afghanistan after 20 years of working with Afghan allies to rebuild their nation.
No matter what one thinks of the justifications for war in the first place, it is unquestionable that this withdrawal is inconceivably irresponsible, immoral and irretrievably bungled. The Biden administration has strengthened the Taliban and in the process sent a message to terrorist organizations and regimes like Iran that the US will continue to retreat in the face of terrorism. This is bad not only for the US and its allies, it’s also quite dangerous for the minorities, women and other vulnerable groups persecuted by human rights violators like the Taliban. So much for a leadership of progressive values and human rights.
The writer is CEO of Social Lite Creative LLC and a research fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute