For two decades, the War in Afghanistan has played out as a low hum in the background of American life: always there, but easy for much of the population, and its political leaders, to look past. But with the country’s quick descent into chaos after the United States pull-out, the conflict has come roaring back onto front pages. The “forgotten war,” as it’s frequently called, can no longer be ignored.
The possibility—perhaps likelihood—that the Taliban could seize control of Afghanistan after U.S. forces left was evident last month when Joe Biden announced his decision. But the rate of the country’s collapse has nevertheless been jarring. Government forces, in which Biden had expressed confidence, are losing control of the country, and the Taliban, which the president has acknowledged is at its “strongest” point in decades, is making rapid gains. Its insurgents have taken more than a dozen provincial capitals, including Kandahar, the second-largest city in the country, in a matter of days. Morale among Afghan security forces is plummeting, with CNN reporting that some soldiers have simply abandoned their posts and changed into civilian clothes. In a reflection of the grim state of affairs, the U.S. on Thursday hurried 3,000 troops to the country to partially evacuate its embassy in Kabul.
Officials insist that America is maintaining a diplomatic presence in Afghanistan. “This is not a wholesale withdrawal,” State Department Spokesman Ned Price told reporters. “What this is is a reduction in the size of our civilian footprint.” But the extraordinary move underscores the efficiency with which the Taliban has overrun the country, and the apparent inability of government forces to hold the line. “This is a group that up until just a few months ago was an underground insurgency,” Ward reported Friday morning. “And now, it holds a vast amount of territory on the ground, and because that’s happened so quickly, you do have to ask the question about how quickly could Kabul fall.”
The rapidly unraveling situation has drawn dire comparisons in the media: In the New Yorker, Susan Glasser quoted an expert who wondered whether this was “going to be Biden’s Rwanda,” referring to the genocide that ravaged the east African nation in the 1990s. Several observers likened the situation to the fall of Saigon. Critics of the planned withdrawal fumed at Biden, all but saying told you so. “President Biden’s strategy has turned an imperfect but stable situation into a major embarrassment and a global emergency in a matter of weeks,” Mitch McConnell said. “[Biden] is finding that the quickest way to end a war is to lose it.”
It’s hard to put it all on Biden. A war that drags out over two decades and four presidencies is not lost overnight, and there were decisions at other points in the conflict that could have averted the situation currently unfolding.
But it is equally hard to overstate the scale of the crisis that has gripped the country in recent days, one with grave implications for residents of the destabilized nation. “[I’m] counting down my last times in this world,” one resident of Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city, told NBC News. Biden, for his part, has made clear that he believes the U.S. cannot be permanently responsible for maintaining order, and that it’s up to the Afghan government to “fight for themselves, fight for their nation,” as he put it earlier this week. According to Axios, the deteriorating conditions on the ground have not altered his position.
Ending America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan, as Biden’s two immediate predecessors each vowed to do, was always going to be messy. But officials, including Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mark Milley, seemed unprepared for just how bad things could get—and how quickly. “There’s going to be no circumstance where you’ll see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan,” Biden said earlier this summer, rejecting comparisons to the end of the Vietnam War. “I do not see that unfolding,” Milley said in June. “I may be wrong, who knows, you can’t predict the future, but I don’t see Saigon 1975 in Afghanistan. The Taliban just aren’t the North Vietnamese army. It’s not that kind of situation.”
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