In cities such as Kabul, Herat and Bamyan, you feel a profound sense of shame when you see the after-effects of the west’s abandonment of Afghanistan: the long queues for food; the people persecuted and sometimes killed for trying to defend the freedoms they have gained in the past 20 years. Only six months after the fall of Kabul, the American and British media seem mostly to have forgotten about it. Typically, the judgment seems to be that we should never have gone in to help Afghanistan in the first place: as though that solves anything.
The catastrophe began before the 2020 US election, when Donald Trump was casting around for anything he could claim as a foreign policy victory, following a series of failures with North Korea, Russia and China. Afghanistan meant nothing to Trump, and he handed it to the Taliban on a plate. There was no obligation on Joe Biden, when he became president, to follow through with this embarrassing deal; but he was desperate to show that he too put American interests before anyone else’s, and he allowed it to stand. After all, when does a US president put a small country’s needs before the chance of an uptick in the domestic opinion polls?
