Barely two days have passed since the Taliban entered Kabul and Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani apparently capitulated before them. That said, the situation may evolve in more than one way, and the time may not be right to start predicting the future. And yet some very general conclusions appear to be at hand.
One is that the final outcome is undoubtedly a failure of the United States in its fight against the Taliban and a shameful manner of abandoning Afghanistan. It’s true that the original mission was to decimate Al-Qaeda, and that had largely been a success. It’s also true that Washington did not want to bear the burden of heavy costs anymore. Obviously, many factors affected the final results (such as Pakistan’s duplicity or the state of the Afghan army), too numerous to be summarised here.
But there is no denying that American mistakes and steps, including those taken over the last year, played a role in the debacle. The Trump administration blundered by pushing through the Doha peace agreement which offered certain important concessions to the Taliban (freeing thousands of their comrades from prisons), while demanding little and vague commitments from their side. The subsequent Biden administration proceeded with a hasty and eventually unorderly withdrawal. But the question that demands attention now is what the US abandoning of Afghanistan may mean for the future of Washington’s involvement in South Asia.