By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton NB] Times & Transcript 

Almost two decades since the United States invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Islamist Taliban regime, Washington is set to exit the country.

U.S. President Joe Biden, in a meeting at the White House with Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani June 25, declared that Afghans “are going to have to decide their future.”

Biden promised continued support for the country, even though American troops are set to finish their withdrawal on Sept. 11, if not sooner. “Our troops may be leaving, but support for Afghanistan is not ending,” he said. Everyone knows this is nonsense.

The military withdrawal will not depend on the situation on the ground, despite the major gains made by the Taliban, whose fighters captured more than 100 districts from Afghan forces in a recent offensive.

It leaves Afghanistan’s government at their mercy. A U.S. intelligence report suggests that it would “struggle” to stand its ground against the “confident” Taliban.

The cost of this 20-year military engagement has been astronomically high. Over 2,300 U.S. servicemen and women have been killed and more than 20,000 injured, along with hundreds more from other nationalities. The estimated financial cost to the U.S. taxpayer is close to a staggering US$1 trillion.

Was it all worth it? Of course not. “Nation-building” doesn’t work when there’s no “nation” to build. Forcing “democracy” on people when all that was attained was a succession of corrupt regimes in Kabul headed by presidents who won fixed elections was no model that impressed ordinary Afghans.

Obviously nothing was learned from the Vietnam debacle. The U.S. should, after the 9/11 attacks, have removed the al-Qaeda terror apparatus in Afghanistan and, after a few months, left the country to its own devices. That may sound cynical, but is this 20-year disaster any better?

The Taliban view themselves not as a rebel group, but as a government-in-waiting. They refer to themselves as the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” the name they used when they were in power from 1996 until being overthrown in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

The Taliban, or “students” in the Pashto language, emerged in the early 1990s following the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. By 1998, the Taliban were in control of almost 90 per cent of the country.

Led by Mawlawi Hibatullah Akhundzada, a hardline religious scholar, it has gradually regained its strength and now controls and influences more territory than at any point since that time.

The Afghan government, or “Kabul administration” as the Taliban refer to it, is considered corrupt and un-Islamic. The Taliban will defeat it once Western troops and airpower leave, and they already have a sophisticated shadow structure, with officials in charge of overseeing everyday services in the areas they control.

Successive American administrations over the years rejected the counsel of both Afghan and foreign experts who said that in the end there would have to be a deal with the Taliban, because they are part of Afghan society and cannot be defeated on the battlefield.

It all started coming to an end when President Donald Trump not only began to negotiate with the Taliban, but also bypassed the corrupt Afghan government. Trump said he wanted to end “forever wars” and Washington signed an agreement with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, in February 2020 to end the protracted conflict.

President Biden has refused to reverse the policy. The talk of democracy and women’s rights that the Americans (and others, including Canadians) brought with them after 9/11 has been forgotten.

In return for the U.S. departure and the release of 5,000 prisoners, all the Taliban have promised is not to host al-Qaeda. The Taliban have won – after two decades, they will have finally driven out the infidels.

The official U.S. departure date is the symbolic 9/11, but they are expected to be gone before that. Within months of the last soldier leaving, there probably won’t be a single human rights NGO extant, nor a single girls’ school left standing, in the entire country.

And the only army of any consequence will be the Taliban, which in one or another iteration has defeated, in turn, the British, the Russians, and the Americans.  Hey, it’s Afghanistan, the “graveyard of empires.”