The catastrophic exit from Afghanistan
Senior Fellow Eric Edelman writes that "disaster is imminent"
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Disaster is imminent in Afghanistan. The judgment that the United States should draw down the roughly 3,500 troops still supporting Afghan forces after 20 years of effort, despite the relatively low casualties and the fact that Afghans were bearing the brunt of the combat, was an arguable proposition when Biden made the call. Reasonable people and experts could and did disagree. What is inexcusable is the failure to foresee and plan for the downstream consequences.
Over the past few days, the Taliban has shifted from sweeping through largely rural districts to contesting larger urban areas.
Over the past few days, the Taliban has shifted from sweeping through largely rural districts to contesting larger urban areas and important provincial capitals—Herat, Kandahar, and Lashkar Gah, where the Taliban appears to have seized nine of the city’s 10 districts, with only the government center, reinforced apparently with units from Kabul and U.S. airstrikes, are barely holding on.
The Taliban will likely find that urban areas fall less quickly and less easily to their forces than the rural areas they have taken so far. But the group’s rapid resurgence over the past few months raises the prospect that Afghanistan will collapse much more quickly than the Biden administration appears to have expected when it announced its withdrawal deadline of September 11. As one anonymous senior Defense Department official told Politico, “I . . . don’t think anyone thought Afghanistan would turn so badly so quick.”
Yet the reaction of the U.S. government seems almost otherworldly. The secretary of state has called the carnage “deeply disturbing and totally unacceptable,” while the U.S. embassy in Kabul has tweeted that the Taliban’s actions constitute possible war crimes and that unless it holds its commanders in check it should have no place in the future governance of Afghanistan. And yet the Biden administration’s policy appears to be meekly to accept a new Taliban emirate, with all that implies.
