Shaun TANDON
After two decades in Afghanistan, America’s longest war was ending with the image of the United States in tatters.
With the swift collapse on Sunday of the government in Kabul, the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks that triggered the US invasion will be marked with the Taliban back in control of Afghanistan, despite a cost to the United States of nearly 2,500 lives and more than $2 trillion.
To some observers, the debacle following the withdrawal of US troops will inevitably weaken the United States on the global stage at a time when President Joe Biden was speaking of rallying democracies.
“America’s credibility as an ally is diminished because of the way the Afghan government was abandoned beginning with the Doha talks’’, said Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States, referring to the deal last year in the Qatari capital with the Taliban in which the United States set a pullout timeline.
Haqqani, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, noted how US diplomats in the end could do little more than send tweets urging the Taliban to stop.
“That envoys of the mightiest nation on earth can be duped as they were in Doha, and its leaders ignored so easily as they have been in the final days, will encourage others to engage in duplicitous diplomacy’’, Haqqani said.
Biden faced heated criticism that the withdrawal was mismanaged, with the United States racing to evacuate its sprawling embassy just a month after he played down fears the Afghan government would crumble quickly.
“It is going to have ramifications not just for Afghanistan’’, said Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican hawk.
“America’s adversaries know they can threaten us, and our allies are questioning this morning whether they can count on us for anything’’, she said in an ABC interview.
The Biden administration is quick to point out that former president Donald Trump negotiated the Doha deal on the withdrawal and that a majority of the US public favours ending “forever wars.”
Trump has repeatedly put the blame on his successor, however, calling for him to resign on Sunday “in disgrace for what he has allowed to happen to Afghanistan.”
“What Joe Biden has done with Afghanistan is legendary. It will go down as one of the greatest defeats in American history!” he said in an earlier statement on Sunday.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, also speaking on ABC, said the United States had “succeeded” in its primary mission of bringing justice to the Al Qaeda perpetrators of the September 11 attacks.
— AFP
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