Afghan Suffering is Just Another Bloody Stain on Biden’s Legacy
Photo by Nava Jamshidi/Getty Images
The news cycle moves fast. Amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s U.S.-sponsored genocide in Gaza, it’s easy to forget that Joe Biden’s presidency first started to come off the rails with the humiliating conclusion of the United States’ 20-year war in Afghanistan. We don’t hear much about Afghanistan these days, but, three years to the day since the last U.S. military plane took off from Kabul, marking the end of America’s chaotic withdrawal from the country, perhaps now is as good a time as any to reacquaint ourselves. What is happening to the people of Afghanistan today is horrifying, and Joe Biden shoulders a lot of responsibility for it.
Beginning during the Trump presidency in 2020, the withdrawal of American forces spurred the Taliban, which had been fighting an insurgency since being ousted from power by the US-led invasion, to begin stepping up its attacks against the U.S.-backed Afghan military. By the summer of 2021, the group was making rapid progress through the country, despite Biden’s assurances that a Taliban victory was far from certain, and by mid-August it had entered its capital of Kabul. The Afghan government duly collapsed and the Taliban, after two decades, was suddenly back in power.
Hasty attempts to extract American troops and their Afghan allies from the country were made over the following two weeks, with more than 120,000 people being lifted to safety. But that nonetheless left a reported 78,000 Afghans and hundreds of Americans to fend for themselves in a land now ruled by a vengeful Taliban. Rightly fearing reprisals by the new government if they stayed, desperate people were driven to cling to the wings of American planes as they took off from Kabul, only to fall to their deaths. It is within this general sense of disarray that ISIS-K, an enemy to both the US-led forces and the Taliban, launched its terrorist attack outside Kabul airport on August 26th. Among the 180 people killed that day were 13 Americans, highlighting the degree to which the Biden administration, despite intelligence reports warning of the probable chaos that was to accompany an American withdrawal, had apparently been caught off guard.
In the early days of its return to power, the Taliban sought to present itself as a changed organization with a respect for human rights, but, predictably enough, the facade didn’t last for long. The regime quickly clamped down on civil liberties, so that today, three years into its rule, the arrests of journalists and activists, the extreme persecution of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities, and instances of public floggings and executions have become the norm. And this, of course, is to say nothing of the situation for women and girls, whose rights have been eroded to an almost unimaginable extent over the last three years.