By Ryan Allen Wight, Copy Editor
On August 15, the Taliban seized Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. President Ashraf Ghani departed to the United Arab Emirates, who received him in a humanitarian capacity, and the Afghan army dispersed. No longer a republic, the Taliban has renamed the country the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
How did we get here? In 2001, America waged war against the Taliban under the Bush Administration after the 9/11 attacks. At the time, Afghanistan was harboring Osama bin Laden, who claimed responsibility for 9/11, as well as other al-Qaeda players.
Following extensive air raids, President Bush sent 1,300 troops – mostly marines – to hunt down bin Laden in November 2001. By April 2004, 20,300 US troops had been deployed.
In 2014, President Obama told our troops in Afghanistan he intended to bring American involvement to “a responsible end.” Over the course of his administration, troop levels increased from ~30,000 at the end of 2008 to over 100,000 in 2011, then decreasing to 8,400 by 2016. This still exceeded the President’s goal of leaving only 5,500 American troops.
On October 15, 2015, President Obama announced that America could not continue with plans for significant decrease in troop numbers on account of the situation’s volatility and lack of cooperation from a continuously violent Taliban.
In November 2020, Chris Miller, who was President Trump’s Acting Secretary of Defense, announced that American troop levels in Afghanistan would decrease to 2,500 in January 2021, claiming plans to “execute this repositioning in a way that protects our fighting men and women, our partners in the Intelligence Community and diplomatic corps, and our superb allies that are critical to rebuilding Afghan and Iraqi security capabilities and civil society for a lasting peace in troubled lands.”
In 2018, President Trump’s administration convinced Pakistan to release Abdul Ghani Baradar from prison, where he’d been since his capture in 2010. Baradar, who had contributed to the founding of the Taliban and married the sister of Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s founder, had urged surrender to the US and Afghanistan in 2001.
This left him with the reputation for being comparatively “pro-peace,” as stated by US diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad, despite having gone on to help organize the Taliban insurgency during the 2000s. Once Baradar was released, the Trump administration negotiated the Doha Agreement with him, and both parties signed it on February 29, 2020. Today, Baradar has been present and visible at every step of the Afghanistan debacle.
The Doha Agreement set up a timeline for US withdrawal from Afghanistan, arranged for talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government, and established agreed-upon expectations for both parties. It is relevant to note here that Afghanistan’s First Vice President, Amrullah Saleh, criticized the agreement for being naive and making far too many concessions to the Taliban.
The steps taken by the Trump administration made US withdrawal certain regardless of whether the executive reigns were to be passed. How the withdrawal would be executed, however, remained uncertain.
On April 14, President Biden announced that the remaining 3,500 American troops in Afghanistan would be home by September 11 of this year, since the US “cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding [its] military presence in Afghanistan — hoping to create ideal conditions for the withdrawal and expecting a different result.” DOD News also paraphrased President Biden as asserting that “the United States will withdraw its troops in a safe, deliberate and responsible manner and in full coordination with its partners and allies in Afghanistan.”
That did not happen.
On July 2, American troops evacuated Bagram Airfield, America’s primary military base in the country; they did this quietly in the middle of the night without communicating with the Afghan army. Just a few days prior at a rally in Ohio, President Trump told the crowd that “The only way [the Afghan government can] last is if we’re there… The whole thing is ridiculous… We’re bringing troops back home from Afghanistan.”
During the month of August, the Taliban swept through the country, an offensive that culminated on August 15 and promptly triggered the absolute mess of an American evacuation. The frenzied American response gave little care for our NATO allies stationed there, the billions of dollars in equipment and weapons left on base and the panicking Afghan people, specifically and most importantly, the Afghan civilians who had worked with the Americans.
I heard one story of an Afghan man who had worked with an American journalist. The Taliban seared his nametag into his chest, quartered and hung him, killed his family, and gave his young daughter to one of their members in marriage as defined by the Talibanic interpretation of Sharia law.
On August 26, two ISIS jihadists set off bombs in Kabul airport, killing 13 US soldiers and injuring 18 more; at least 90 Afghans were also killed. In retaliation, the US launched two airstrikes; the second one killed 10 Afghan civilians, seven of whom were children — as claimed by The New York Times.
One of the Biden administration’s PR moves has been to denigrate the Afghan army and people. I consider it rather shameless not to acknowledge your gaffs and simultaneously call the Afghans weak, despite the number of Afghan army deaths adding up to over 300 percent of the amount of American army deaths since 2001. When America departed, so did its resources. For example, in July the Afghan army ceased to have the benefit of American medical evacuation.
Every administration since President Bush has been trying to leave Afghanistan. Time will tell us the consequences of this summer’s debacles, and perhaps the future will afford us a new historical understanding that shall, however belatedly, make sense of the world events – and the powerless confusion – in which everyday people now find themselves inextricably implicated.
