The Taliban’s tough task, and Biden’s

When the Taliban last rolled into Kabul in September 1996, the city was shattered by civil war. I remember streets littered with unexploded bombs, few functioning shops and ruins everywhere. But it is a very different country they take over now.

Most of the population of Afghanistan was born since 9/11, and despite the many failings of the U.S.-led intervention, there was enough stability for real social change to take root. The people have very different expectations than their parents. In the capital city, young people meet in cafés with names like “Make Coffee Not War,” and dreamt of a different future until that was so abruptly taken away.

The last departing American C-130 lumbering into the night sky was followed by a barrage of automatic rifle fire that went on for hours as the Taliban celebrated. But in the cold light of dawn, they face daunting problems. Some 20 million people need urgent food aid, the winter is drawing in, the economy is on hold as the country’s reserves are frozen in the U.S., and there is no money in the banks.

In the immediate days after the fall of the country, there were sporadic and brave demonstrations across the country, as crowds of people raised the green, red and black of the national flag. They were brutally suppressed. But they were an indication of other more organized civil resistance that could develop.

Women expect different lives from the narrow path laid down by the Taliban, which restricts schooling to all ages, and limits job opportunities. High school graduates in the last 20 years have been graded across the whole country, and just hours before the fall of Kabul, the highest mark this year, as in some previous years, was won by a girl.

Since the fall of Kabul, women are already running home school programs to make up for the closure of many girls’ schools. And these networks could be a bedrock of new resistance.

There is also armed resistance in the one province still holding out — the Panjshir Valley, just a couple of hours drive north of Kabul. It is a natural fortress, with high mountain ridges on three sides and the only entrance a narrow choking valley to the south. Thousands of former soldiers who did not join the general collapse of the army have made their way to join the militias in the valley who have a special place in Afghan legend as they held out against the Russians in the 1980s and the Taliban in the 1990s.

The U.S. now faces a challenge as to whether to support the resistance. President Biden’s instinct has been opposed to more troops since the start of the war. As vice president, he was the strongest voice in the Obama White House against putting in more troops. But the public appearance in Afghanistan this week of Amin-ul-Haq, one of the leading figures of Al Qaeda, may change the balance. He was well known enough to face U.S. sanctions even before 9/11, and his emergence reveals the hollowness of Taliban promises to have severed their links with the organization.

But America has lost so much capacity to operate by leaving. A drone strike, meant as retaliation for the suicide bombing which took the lives of 13 U.S. troops at the airport, reportedly killed 10 members of a family that included a former American employee who had received an invitation to come to the U.S. Without good intelligence on the ground, America is flying blind.

The departure from Afghanistan felt like the close of a chapter of history as significant as the fall of the Berlin Wall that signaled the end of the Cold War. It drew down the curtain on a period of U.S.-led intervention which began in the idealism of the Clinton years, then moved into the controversial wars of the Bush era.

Unlike Iraq, the Afghan war was widely seen in many countries as a just cause to support. At the peak, more than 50 nations sent troops. It was the first war to be fought under the founding charter of NATO that an attack on one should be considered an attack on all. That alliance was tested in the “America First” rhetoric of the Trump years. There was some relief across different parts of the political spectrum when Biden came through Europe earlier this year with the mantra “America is back.”

But the debacle of the departure from Kabul has raised many questions about whether there is a pivot. The impact of America’s failure cannot be underestimated. Managing relations with Afghanistan will require wisdom and foresight in statecraft, and the ability to build alliances — qualities that have been in short supply in the last few months.

Loyn is the author of “The Long War: The Inside Story of America and Afghanistan since 9/11.”