President John F. Kennedy once said of the Bay of Pigs debacle, which saw a CIA-backed invasion of Cuba end in spectacular failure, “Victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan.”
When he revealed last week that the US had located and killed its most wanted terrorist, al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was residing in a home in Kabul, Afghanistan, President Joe Biden took a victory lap.
On August 30, the first anniversary of the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, which put an end to the country’s longest war, don’t anticipate a celebration along those lines.
Any realistic evaluation of that action demonstrates that it will long be remembered as a defeat rather than a victory, and it is likely that no one will take responsibility for the choice.
After the Taliban government gave Osama bin Laden shelter and allowed him to plan and carry out the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 Americans, the US declared war on Afghanistan in 2001.
The new US-backed government in Kabul oversaw two decades of advancement in Afghanistan as US and NATO forces fought Taliban and al Qaeda forces. Afghanistan wasn’t Norway, to be sure, but it was developing into a somewhat functional, democratisation Central Asian state that saw remarkable progress in lowering child mortality and raising life expectancy, one that gave jobs to women and provided education for millions of girls, one that supported dozens of independent media outlets and held regular, if flawed, presidential elections.
On August 15, 2021, the Taliban overthrew the government and everything changed when the US started to withdraw. Women’s rights were lost.
The Taliban have ordered women to stay at home and to completely cover themselves should they ever leave the house.
They also have no right to work, except for a small number of jobs specifically related to women, such as cleaning women’s restrooms in Kabul.
They also have to be accompanied by a male relative when they travel more than 45 miles. If women disobey these orders, the Taliban will punish their male relatives. After age 12, girls are not allowed to continue their education.
One fact about how the Taliban run Afghanistan is enough to demonstrate the group’s utter incompetence: According to the UN, approximately half of the Afghan population is currently “faced with acute hunger.”
There is no proof that the Taliban are establishing an “inclusive” government as their leaders promised they would, which raises questions about their regard for other ethnic Afghan groups.
The majority of the Taliban’s leadership is composed of Pashtuns, while other Afghan ethnic groups like the Hazaras, Tajiks, and Uzbeks are largely shut out of positions of power.
Regarding their support for democracy: Conveniently, the Taliban reject election-based government. Instead, they are a theocracy, with their leader claiming to be the “Commander of the Faithful,” or the head of all Muslims. 40% of Afghanistan’s independent media outlets have shut down in the last year under Taliban rule.
Shows that it was the worst agreement ever According to a UN report, Sirajuddin Haqqani, the acting interior minister, is one of the most influential men in Afghanistan right now and is linked to al Qaeda.
He is “assessed to be a member of the wider Al-Qaida leadership, but not of the Al-Qaida core leadership,” the report stated.
Haqqani was blandly referred to as “the deputy leader of the Taliban” in a February 2020 opinion piece with his byline in The New York Times. The Times failed to inform readers that Haqqani was also on the FBI’s most wanted list and that his men had abducted a journalist for ransom. New York Times.
This opinion piece contained absurd lies like, “We will work together to find a way to build an Islamic system where all Afghans have equal rights, where the rights of women that are granted by Islam — from the right to education to the right to work — are protected,” and “reports about foreign [terrorist] groups in Afghanistan are politically motivated exaggerations by the warmongering players on all sides of the war.”
How It Occurred
A series of decisions made by former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden, and Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad—the lead US negotiator with the Taliban—led to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan a year ago.
None of these men will likely ever fully admit their responsibility for the disaster that occurred in Afghanistan as a result of the worst diplomatic agreement in US history, which allowed the Taliban to achieve what they could never achieve on the battlefield at the negotiating table in Doha, Qatar.
In Kabul, Afghanistan, as people receive food rations provided by a South Korean humanitarian aid organization, a Taliban fighter keeps watching.
Read more:-
- Trump Calls the Fbi’s Search for Top-secret Nuclear Weapons Materials at Mar-a-Lago a “Hoax”
- What’s Going on With Donald Trump’s Probes and Lawsuits?
- In Season Three of Never Have I Ever, Do Fabiola and Aneesa Get Together?
Khalilzad has defended the agreement, stating that it was preferable to reach an agreement sooner rather than later because “the negotiation was a result of—based on the judgment that we weren’t winning the war and therefore time was not on our side.”
In contrast to the more than two million men and women who served in the US military on active duty, in the reserves, and in the National Guard, only about 2,500 US troops were supporting the fledgling Afghan state by the end of the Trump administration.
The Afghan military was able to repel the Taliban, who were never able to capture and hold any of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals, before Biden announced the complete withdrawal of American forces in April 2021, with the help of 9,000 allied, primarily NATO troops and 18,000 contractors.
There was no significant, vocal Democratic Party constituency calling for a complete US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Biden’s top military advisers had made it abundantly clear to him that doing so would carry risks.
So why did Biden carry out the withdrawal plan that he had inherited from Trump?
US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and US CENTCOM Commander Gen. Kenneth McKenzie testified in public before the US Senate Armed Services Committee that they had told the Biden administration that the Afghan military would disintegrate without the US maintaining about 2,500 troops there. There was a collapse.
