US/Biden Foreign Policy in Review

"There's going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan [in a comparison to US retreat of humiliation from Vietnam]. 

"It is not at all comparable. None whatsoever. Zero."

"Look, the Taliban, per se, is not our enemy. That's critical."

U.S. President Joe Biden

"[Biden has been wrong on] nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."

Former U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates

A U.S. Air Force plane takes off from Kabul International Airport on Aug. 30, 2021, the day the U.S. completed its withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. (Aamir Qureshi/AFP via Getty Images)

 

When, under the "peace talks" with the Taliban the Trump administration arranged meetings that pointedly excluded the presence of anyone representing the Afghan government of the day, it was clear the United States felt it had surrendered far too much of its time, manpower and wealth on aiding a country that they claimed wasn't interested in helping itself. The US administration was prepared not to notice the Taliban ongoing attacks while professing to be pledging to a pause in hostilities throughout the talks, excluding Afghan government presence.

The American government chose not to notice the savagery and atrocities visited on Afghan civilians and Afghan military personnel by the Taliban, despite and during the talks, as long as the Taliban had the great good sense to avoid harming any American troops. The agreement reached in the absence of any Afghan government agency, between the US and the Taliban during the "peace talks" demonstrated US sanctimonious goodwill and vicious Taliban perfidy.

Throughout those talks, the US ignored the Afghan government's anxieties to be present at the talks that would lead to the future of their country thereby permitting the Taliban to continue its attacks and to undertake a surge in its terror operations, violating the agreement reached -- again and again -- while the people of Afghanistan shuddered with the certainty that the civilized life they were introduced to in the past twenty years was an experiment past its prime.

"Somebody else's civil war", just wasn't persuasive enough to salvage the twenty years of NATO and UN involvement in the war-torn country, against an Islamist insurgency devoted to slaughter in honour of the signal principle of Islamic jihad. When American troops were precipitously pulled out of Afghanistan, and its UN and NATO allies followed suit, Joe Biden simply blamed the Afghan military for its unwillingness to fight for its own nationhood.

When, on August 15, 2021 Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled and the Taliban entered Kabul, CH-47 helicopters were frantically shuttling diplomats from the US embassy compound to Kabul Airport where bedlam reigned. And where thousands of fearful Afghans massed at the gates with their documents that turned out to be useless. Some rushed the runways clambering onto wings of departing aircraft. It's how some were killed.

 

A man carries a bloodied child as a wounded woman lies on the street after Taliban fighters fired guns and lashed out with whips and other objects to control a crowd outside the airport in Kabul August 17.Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times/Shutterstock

 

Two were shot by American soldiers, another two fell from wheel wells of a departing US air force C-17 transport plane ascending to the sky south of Kabul. Tangled in a C-17's landing gear a corpse was later discovered. It was during that desperate time of pleading and praying and hoping and the final fearsome realization that no one would rescue them, that the breakaway Taliban faction, the Islamic State - Khorasan Province killed over 180 Afghan civilians in a suicide bombing.

Today, of Afghanistan's 42 million people, 28 million face starvation, requiring humanitarian aid to survive. Women are once again enslaved by Taliban rules. Virtue and vice squads roam the streets, and the country's health services are unable to even limp along tending to the most basic needs of the country's residents, in a collapsed economy.

"We completed one of the biggest airlifts in history, with more than 120,000 people evacuated to safety.  That number is more than double what most experts thought were possible.  No nation — no nation has ever done anything like it in all of history.  Only the United States had the capacity and the will and the ability to do it, and we did it today."

"The extraordinary success of this mission was due to the incredible skill, bravery, and selfless courage of the United States military and our diplomats and intelligence professionals."

"For weeks, they risked their lives to get American citizens, Afghans who helped us, citizens of our Allies and partners, and others onboard planes and out of the country.  And they did it facing a crush of enormous crowds seeking to leave the country.  And they did it knowing ISIS-K terrorists — sworn enemies of the Taliban — were lurking in the midst of those crowds."

U.S. President Joe Biden, The White House, August 31, 2021

Taliban officials declare victory over the United States from the tarmac of Kabul's international airport on August 31. It was hours after the last American troops left Afghanistan.

Jim Huylebroek/The New York Times/Redux