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Biden insensitive to US exit from Afghanistan as Taliban sweep provinces (representation)
Washington:
The Taliban are making quick wins in Afghanistan, but President Joe Biden remains firm on an exit from the United States with limited options appearing to be on the table to reverse insurgent momentum.
The Taliban’s advances, including the capture of six provincial capitals in a matter of days, may seem surprising in their speed, but were not unexpected in Washington as the US military completes the withdrawal ordered by Biden by August 31.
“The decision to step down was made in the full knowledge that what we see happening now was likely to happen,” said Laurel Miller, until 2017, United States Special Representative for Afghanistan and the United States. Pakistan.
For Biden, who has long championed the end of America’s longest-ever war, there is a cold calculation – nothing more could be achieved, and the United States has long since achieved its stated goal of defeat al-Qaeda in the region after the September 11, 2001 attacks, although the Taliban have yet to cut ties with the group.
“Almost 20 years of experience has shown us,” Biden said last month, “that” just one more year “of fighting in Afghanistan is not a solution but a recipe for being there indefinitely.”
Continue the airstrikes?
The United States plans to continue arming and training the Afghan army, but a key question is whether it will conduct airstrikes against the Taliban after August 31.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby confirmed on Monday that the U.S. bombing had supported Afghan allies last week, but said no decision had been made after the pullout, as the administration previously said the air power would be limited to counterterrorism operations.
“This is their country to defend. This is their fight,” Kirby said, while acknowledging that the situation “is clearly not going in the right direction.”
The administration is also warning the Taliban that they risk being outcasts if they take power by force, even though the militant Islamist group was internationally isolated when it ruled much of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.
The outcast’s argument is “the leverage that the administration relies heavily on because it’s the leverage it has,” said Miller, now director of the Asia program at International Crisis. Group.
“The Taliban, I think, would prefer to have legitimacy and financial assistance from the international community. But their number one preference is to take power.
For the government, she said, the best-case scenario is to force an impasse with the Taliban and then seek a political settlement.
Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, doubted the United States had the means to turn the tide now that it was withdrawing.
“I fear that the Taliban are so strong and that the Afghan army is so besieged at the moment, that it will be difficult to find some kind of moderator of momentum on the part of the United States,” he said. he declares.
Aaron David Miller, a veteran of US politics now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said airstrikes cannot win the war.
“All they can do is maybe stop losing one – an unacceptable result which is essentially the history of American politics there for two decades,” he wrote on Twitter.
Bitter public on the war
The Taliban, when in power, notoriously imposed violent and ultra-austere Islam on Afghanistan, banning music and severely restricting women and girls.
But Biden, like his predecessor Donald Trump, has repeatedly said the United States is not there to build a nation and accused the government in Kabul, with its internal bickering and corruption allegations, of not being up to the task at the moment.
“Today, American public opinion is either opposed to war or oblivious to war,” Kugelman said.
The terrorist threat to the United States outside of Afghanistan remains limited, he said, although more fighting could have devastating effects in the region, especially through a new exodus of refugees.
“So I think if you saw a worst-case scenario develop in which the Taliban threatened to take control of Afghanistan as a whole, I don’t think that would change the administration’s calculation,” Kugelman said.
“I think that for the administration the political cost would be higher if the troops were to be sent back to Afghanistan after their withdrawal.”
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
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