How they see us: A delayed withdrawal from Afghanistan
President Joe Biden has blown up the Afghan peace process with his “unsound exit policy,” said Mehmoodul-Hassan Khan in the Pakistan Observer (Pakistan). A year ago in Doha, the capital of Qatar, the Trump administration agreed to withdraw the 2,500 U.S. troops stationed in Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, in exchange for the Taliban ceasing attacks on American soldiers and cutting ties with jihadist terrorist groups. The Afghan government and the Taliban had been negotiating a power-sharing accord based around that timeline. But Biden announced last week that the pullout won’t be completed until Sept. 11. To the Taliban, that’s a “severe violation” of the Doha deal, and so the group has “dashed to ground” its own commitments, pulling out of peace talks brokered by Turkey. The Afghan government, the Taliban, and other factions are back to “ground zero,” battling one another for the “lion’s share in the ongoing power game.” Civil war seems inevitable.
The point of Biden’s delay is to mend relations with NATO, said Sultan Barakat in AlJazeera.com (Qatar). Biden has long wanted to end the forever war, but the Trump administration announced its hasty pullout without consulting America’s allies. Some 7,000 coalition troops are currently deployed in Afghanistan, most of them NATO personnel, and they are “dependent on the U.S. military for airlift support.” The new withdrawal date gives other NATO countries time to stage their own pullouts before the departure of the last American. And chaos after that date is not inevitable, so long as Afghans talk to one another. It’s encouraging that the Taliban have consistently said they don’t want a repeat of the devastating 1992 civil war and “do not seek a collapse of the Afghan state.”
But that’s almost certainly what will happen, said The Economic Times (India) in an editorial. Biden claims that the original objective of America’s post-9/11 Afghan intervention—to root out al Qaida, which was being sheltered by the Taliban—has been achieved. But that’s not true: The Taliban still have ties to the terrorist outfit, and now ISIS has a presence in the country. When the U.S. “cuts its losses and leaves,” the Taliban will grab ever more territory from the weak government in Kabul. Pakistan’s military has aided the Taliban for decades, and it could use Taliban-held territory as a training ground for terrorist groups that will launch attacks against India.
We Afghans wanted the Americans out, said Daily Outlook Afghanistan (Afghanistan), but only once our country had attained “security, stability, peace, and the realization of democracy.” That’s not the case now: Half the nation is under Taliban control, and opium-smuggling is rife. A speedy American withdrawal will only worsen conditions on the ground and weaken the morale of Afghan government troops. We can now expect “at least a partial return of Taliban power,” and “the first to suffer could well be girls and women,” who will face a life with no freedom and no education under the Islamist group’s rule.