Taliban declare victory
There is no doubt in our hearts and minds that President Joe Biden, whose son fought in one of America’s post-9/11 wars, was torn when he announced that the U.S. plans to withdraw all of its fighting men and women from Afghanistan by Sept. 11— the 20th anniversary of an unprecedented attack on our nation.
Addressing the nation from the Treaty Room in the White House on April 14, the same room where President George W. Bush solemnly announced on Oct. 7, 2001, that the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had begun, Biden said: “I’m now the fourth United States president to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan: two Republicans, two Democrats. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth.”
We never minced words when it came to President Donald Trump’s determination to end America’s post9/11 “forever wars” at seemingly any cost. And we will not mince words today. Biden’s decision to “end the forever war” in Afghanistan by Sept. 11 will, sadly, but almost certainly, come back to haunt his administration and the people of Afghanistan in ways reminiscent of America’s disastrous exit from Vietnam.
We’re by no means alone in this assessment. Editorial boards across the country ranging in ideology from The Wall Street Journal to The Washington Post have decried the Biden decision, with the latter saying it “may spare the United States further costs and lives but will almost certainly be a disaster for the country’s 39 million people—and, in particular, its women.”
Moreover, not unlike Trump—who last November fired then Defense Secretary Mark Esper after he reportedly said in a memo that the U.S. should not draw down troops in Afghanistan until after the Taliban met the conditions of the stalled peace talks—Biden’s decision to remove all U.S. troops from Afghanistan ignores the assessment of his own intelligence community.
What happens next will be hard for anyone who served in Afghanistan to stomach—or for anyone who lost a friend or family member in the long, brave fight to bring liberal democracy to the Afghan people. What happens next is almost certainly a return to the Taliban’s brutal interpretation of Shariah law, where women are treated as second-class citizens, lesbians and gays are persecuted, if not imprisoned or executed; and those who cooperate with U.S. and coalition forces are summarily executed, or, worse, put on public display, tortured, then executed.
A lot can happen between now and Sept. 11. But with Taliban leaders already declaring victory and reasserting Shariah law in much of the country, we fear peace is the last thing we’ll see in Afghanistan any time soon.