In less than two months, it will be two decades since the US invaded Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11 2001 attacks. The invasion came after the Taliban government ignored an ultimatum to hand over the Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who was accused of plotting the attacks.
When then US president George W Bush sent US troops into Afghanistan, aided by enthusiastic supporters such as the UK and others coerced by his “either you are with us or against us” rhetoric, few would have imagined that it would last 20 years. The initial purpose, toppling the Taliban, took less than two months.
Not even the most sceptical observers at the time would have imagined the monumental failure that it would turn out to be. Fewer even would have contemplated the possibility of the 20th anniversary seeing the ultraconservative Taliban, best known for its imposition of an extreme version of Sharia law, including confining women to the home and depriving them of education, taking control again.
But this seems to be the most likely outcome after US President Joe Biden chose not only not to reverse the pullout initiated by his predecessor Donald Trump, but to accelerate it, leaving a vacuum that allowed the group to take about half of the country’s provincial capitals by the weekend.
Hide books
After the fall of Kandahar in the south and Herat in the west, the country’s second- and third-largest cities respectively, the same happened to the fourth largest, Mazar-i-Sharif, in the north, on Saturday. By Sunday afternoon, Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani had reportedly fled the country after Taliban insurgents entered Kabul, the capital city.
In a sign of what may come, The Economist’s 1843 magazine told of a retired teacher in Kandahar who had decided that it was time to hide his books. A shopkeeper in the town, the magazine said, had reported a brisk uptick in the sale of burkas — an indication of how progress that had seen girls going back to school, some of whom over the past 20 years would have grown up to have professions or take up positions in public life — had ground to a halt.
While there weren’t reports of officially sanctioned mass violence against girls and women during the Taliban’s previous rule — one of its most cowardly acts, the shooting of 15-year old Malala Yousafzai for campaigning for girls’ education happened in Pakistan in 2012 — The Guardian quoted Bush as expressing concern that “Afghan women and girls are going to suffer unspeakable harm”. If not explicit violence, they are likely to have an almost total curtailment of their rights.
The US retreat from Afghanistan, which has seen Biden send troops to evacuate embassy staff in scenes that have brought comparisons to its defeat in Vietnam in 1975, comes about two years after Trump decided to pull US troops out of Syria. Trump was then accused of undermining US credibility by abandoning allies, including Syrian Kurds, partners in the fight against the Islamic State, who were then left exposed to attack by Turkey.
Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman speculated that the reaction from the “foreign policy establishment” would have been different if it had been Trump overseeing what he described as an irresponsible and immoral stance by the Americans in Afghanistan.
While the plight of Afghan women might not be the highest priority in Washington, one would think it would be concerned about its own standing, being on the verge of handing the country back to the Taliban, after having sacrificed about 2,500 of its own troops, and having little to show for about $2-trillion spent on the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It abandons the country having done precious little to secure the safety of those who had co-operated with it, sending a terrible message to its allies elsewhere.
The plight of the invading Soviet Union forces in Afghanistan from the late 1970s led to warnings that Bush and the hawks who advised him failed to heed. US battle fatigue now is understandable, with no prospect of a military victory.
The chaotic nature of its withdrawal, however, does its credibility no good and leaves terrified Afghans to a cruel fate.
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