To The Victor Go The Spoils

 

"This decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It's about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries."

"I was not going to extend this forever war, and I was not extending a forever exit."

"Yes, the American people should hear this. Three hundred million dollars a day for two decades. What have we lost as consequences in terms of opportunities? I refuse to continue a war that was no longer in the vital national interests of our people. We've been a nation too long at war."

"There is nothing 'low grade' or 'low risk' about any war."

U.S.President Joe Biden

 

"I had to go to the bank with my mother but when I went, the Taliban [were] beating women with sticks."

"It's the first time I've ever seen something like that and it really frightened me."

22-year-old, name-withheld Afghan woman

 

"It is a historical day and a historical moment."

"We are proud of these moments, that we liberated our country from a great power."

Zabihullah Mujahid spokesman, Taliban

 

"We demilitarized those systems so that they'll never be used again."

"We felt it more important to protect our forces than to bring those systems back."

Gen.Kennth F.McKenzie, head, U.S.Central Command, Afghanistan

In his interview with reporters General McKenzie confirmed that over 150 military vehicles and aircraft had been disabled by U.S. forces before they left Afghanistan on the cusp of 31 August, the agreed-upon withdrawal date for all U.S. and NATO-allied countries which had taken part in the U.S.-led mission to capture al-Qaeda's leader and in the process oust the governing Taliban Islamists for refusing to surrender Osama bin Laden, the esteemed guest of the Taliban, to U.S. forces.

 

The invasion represented the U.S.'s and its allies' reaction to the al-Qaeda-planned and -executed attacks on the World Trade Center, and Pentagon in 2001. The side-effect of that action was the removal of an Islamist fundamentalist tyrannical government that reviled democratic values and human rights, administering the affairs of the war-wracked country under strict sharia law that marginalized women and girls and practised capital punishment as just desserts for opposing sharia strictures.

The Taliban proved implacable to conventional conflict meant to subdue them and destroy their ambitions; for two decades they regularly spent the winter months in the mountains separating Afghanistan and Pakistan, sponsored by, trained by, and funded and armed by the Pakistan Interagency Intelligence service. In the spring they descended to carry on their insurgency. President Biden's logic and sanctimony over U.S. intervention in the affairs of other countries will not serve his country well.

The very Islamist fundamentalists who succeeded in shocking the world community by the audacity and success of the 9/11 attacks have not been defeated. The Wahhabist, Deobandist and Salafist extremists are firmly established in Afghanistan's hinterlands where the Islamic State of Khorasan lost no time in reminding the U.S. of their presence and their mission when suicide bombers killed 13 U.S.Marines and scores of Afghans at Kabul airport which the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (Taliban) were supposedly protecting.

Taliban forces celebrate the withdrawal of US forces in Kandahar.

 

As for the tumult and chaos and violence of the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan -- a highly preventable event which succeeded in producing inestimable damage to American prestige, its power image, and its relations with its allies, there is no excuse other than rank and deliberate ignorance of the risks involved in such an abandonment despite that U.S. intelligence oversight made it clear that the confusion, chaos and harm done would be the result of such an ignominious exit. "I take responsibility", said President 

 

Biden.

Leaving the Taliban in control of a grater territory than they controlled before the allied West's entry in 2001. "This was a disgraceful and disastrous departure that will allow the Taliban and al-Qaeda to celebrate the 20th anniversary of 9/11 by having complete control of Afghanistan. We are less safe as a result of this self-inflicted wound", lashed out U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.

Almost two-and-a-half thousand U.S. troops were killed in those two decades in Afghanistan, and many others among the militaries of NATO allies supporting the U.S. in the country. At the same time an estimated 240,000 Afghans lost their lives. The cost to the Western treasury, borne mostly by the U.S. for those 20 years in Afghanistan was $2 trillion, a sum impossible to imagine, one that hugely benefited contractors of all stripes in a massive undertaking of undocumented and deliberate corruption.

 

 

In Kandahar, Taliban supporters celebrated the return to power of those who had defied conventional warfare for the troop-defying exploits of guerrilla warfare. In the eastern city of Khost a funeral took place, coffins draped with Western flags, symbolic of Western forces departing in a flurry of excited pressure as desperate Afghans clamoured to be taken along to safety from the Taliban. The image of the powerful, wealthy nations of the Western democracies coffined in their demise, celebrated, not mourned.

 

Taliban supporters gather to listen to the Taliban's governor for Kandahar province.

 

The chaotic airlift managed to evacuate over 123,000 desperate people from Kabul by the United States and its allies in a frenetic two-week period. Many Afghans who had helped the Western forces and their diplomats stationed in Afghanistan, desperate to leave and escape the certain retribution as traitors awaiting them by the Taliban were left behind, to face their fate or somehow manage to extricate themselves.

The Taliban are jubilant; not only did they 'force' the largest, best-trained and -equipped military the world has ever seen to retreat and leave the spoils to them, they were left in possession of billions-worth of military equipment. The U.S. spent $83 billion in providing the Afghan national police and military with technologically advanced weaponry. That is all now in the hands of their successors, the Taliban, along with all the rolling stock and weapons left by the departing American troops.

 

A C-130 at Hamid Karzai International Airport  Getty Images

 

Videos have been posted online with the Taliban inspecting endless lines of vehicles, opening crates of new firearms, of communications gear, of military drones. "Everything that hasn't been destroyed is the Taliban's now", an American official speaking anonymously, confided to Reuters. The Taliban, it is now estimated, are the proud possessors of over 2,000 armoured vehicles inclusive of U.S. Humvees; up to 40 aircraft, including UH-60 Black Hawks, Scout attack helicopters and ScanEagle military drones. 

The U.S. military, said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, is unconcerned with Taliban members wearing abandoned American military uniforms, walking about Kabul with American weapons, sizing up U.S. helicopters at Kabul aircraft; they could inspect all they wanted, he said, but would not be capable of flying them. And how wrong he was; members of the Afghan military, trained by Americans to fly the helicopters, who recognized the expediency of going over to the Taliban are more than capable of teaching their new masters.

An A-29 surrounded by abandoned kit   Getty Images