President Joe Biden is being criticized for failing to anticipate the rapid takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban and for not having plans in place for the evacuation of those who had helped the United States in its efforts to establish a democratic government in that country. Yet critics of the administration’s response acknowledge that the United States should have been preparing evacuation plans since at least February 2020, when former President Donald Trump signed a deal with the Taliban to remove U.S. troops by May of this year.
“There was no plan from the Trump Administration on how to move Afghan civilians out of the country … so we had to begin building one from scratch,” a White House official told Politico. It was taking two years to process special immigrant visa applications when the Biden administration came to power, and the official said, “we reduced the timeline for processing by more than 50 percent,” to between nine and 12 months.
According to historian Heather Cox Richardson, national security policy analyst Dr. John Gans of the University of Pennsylvania has noted that the State Department had been badly weakened under the Trump administration and was not ready to organize a complicated handoff.
Richardson also notes the likely surge in refugees from the country. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, with about 90 percent of the population living below the poverty line of $2 a day. “The country depends on foreign aid,” she writes. “Under the U.S.-supported Afghan government, the United States and other nations funded about 80 percent of Afghanistan’s budget. In 2020, foreign aid made up about 43 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP … down from 100 percent of it in 2009.”
The Taliban’s takeover of the country jeopardizes the foreign aid that Afghanistan has come to depend upon. The United States has frozen billions of dollars of Afghan government money held in this country, and both the European Union and Germany have suspended their financial support for the country. The International Monetary Fund blocked Afghanistan’s access to $460 million in currency reserves.
That is part of the reason why the Taliban is trying to put on a moderate face, promising to pardon its opponents and grant limited rights to women.
As for the decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, both Trump and Biden recognized the wisdom of doing so. “Deciding not to keep fighting an unwinnable war for a less-than-vital interest hardly means the United States will not fight when the stakes are higher,” said Stephen Walt, a scholar of international relations at Harvard University. “On the contrary, ending the long and futile war in Afghanistan will allow Washington to focus more attention on bigger priorities.”
Stephen Pomper, who served as a senior White House official for human rights during the Obama administration and is now acting policy director at the International Crisis Group, agreed. “One of the realities that has been realized in the past two decades is that advancing human rights policy through military intervention is extremely difficult.”
The Taliban takeover also creates a situation where a mix of Pakistani factions in eastern Afghanistan could pose a problem for the country. Most of the groups are focused on fighting local battles, but the TTP (Pakistani Taliban) have a long history of brutal violence, and other extremist groups have migrated across the border from Pakistan.
“All these groups follow the extremist ideology known to analysts as ‘jihadi Salafism’, a fusion of ultra-conservative strands of Sunni Islam practised in the Gulf with a newer and radical belief that it is the duty of every Muslim to fight individually as well as collectively against ‘tyranny’, wherever it is found,” reports The Guardian. “This kind of thinking contrasts dramatically with the old folk traditions of Islamic observance in Afghanistan and even with the reactionary schools followed by the Taliban. Observers say the success of Isis in Syria and Iraq has inspired some younger Afghans to spread jihadi Salafism further. … the Taliban in power may find themselves fighting their own insurgents, composed not of those loyal to the former US-backed government but those who see their new rulers as sellouts.”
The News Café generally focuses on three stories of the day, but occasionally will delve more deeply into a single story, as we have done today. The fall of Afghanistan has far-reaching implications that are “sucking the air” from other matters, like the environment and COVID-19, but we will return to those issues in the days ahead.
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