The Kabul bombing is the anticipation of the chaos to come – David Smith

The tantalizing comparison between the withdrawal of US forces from Kabul in 2021 and the withdrawal from Saigon in 1975 is less and less effective. About seven thousand people (5,500 Vietnamese civilians and about 1,500 Americans) have been taken away from Vietnam, while since August 14, the day before the Afghan capital fell to the Taliban, more than 95,000 people have left Afghanistan with a historic bridge airplane.

And the departure from Saigon did not have to face the suicide bombers. The attacks of 26 August carried out by the Islamic State (IS) group in Kabul, in which 13 US soldiers and at least sixty Afghan civilians were killed, interrupted the evacuation operations and turned a crisis into a catastrophe.

It was the darkest day of Joe Biden’s presidency, and he has no good options left: he must decide whether to shorten, maintain or extend the August 31 deadline for the full withdrawal of US forces.

Biden’s dilemma
Shortening time and fleeing now would leave hundreds of US citizens and thousands of Afghan collaborators stranded in hostile territory by most estimates. But staying longer would be an invitation to further attacks on the huge crowds at the airport by the local wing of IS (the Islamic State of Khorasan province, Iskp) and, after August 31, by the Taliban themselves.

“Every extra day we stay is another day we know ISKP will target the airport to attack both US and Allied forces, as well as innocent civilians,” Biden warned Tuesday.

Having already disappointed international allies, who wanted a return of the American leadership with the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, the president also finds himself with a changed political landscape at home. It is true that relatively few Americans care about Afghanistan or other foreign policy issues, being quite focused on the pandemic and how to put something on the table. But now, after the heaviest day in terms of losses for US troops in Afghanistan in more than a decade, the body bags returning home will be a wake-up call for the isolationists and apathetic too.

This tragedy will fuel America’s polarization and raise the political temperature. Some Republicans have already called for the resignation of the president. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley said, This bombing is the catastrophic product of Joe Biden’s leadership failure. It is now painfully clear that he has neither the will nor the ability to lead the country. He must resign ”.

In the long run, the August 26 atrocity offers a glimpse of the chaos to come in Afghanistan and how sadly the efforts to build nation and export Western-style democracy have failed. If ISKP wanted to attract the world‘s attention and point out the limits of US power, it certainly succeeded.

The ISKP is a sworn enemy of the Taliban and ideologically even more extreme. Among its ranks there are also some Taliban who were opposed to peace talks with the United States. The bombing at Kabul airport suggests what might happen after the Americans leave.

All of this adds to the Taliban’s threats to human rights, particularly those of women and girls, the weakness of government institutions, and an economy plunging into the abyss. “This is a full-fledged humanitarian crisis,” said Bob Menendez, chairman of the Washington Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In addition to parallels with Saigon, it has also been widely observed with frustration in recent days that twenty years of US blood and resources in Afghanistan have failed to make a difference. Or maybe Thursday, when Pandora’s box opened, it was seen that they made a difference, but for the worse.

Mehdi Hasan, an MSNBC host, tweeted: “We invaded Afghanistan to fight a terrorist group, Al Qaeda, which attacked us. Now that we are leaving, we are attacked by another terrorist group, IS, which is worse than Al Qaeda and which did not exist when we invaded the country. As I have already said: the war on terrorism has only given us more war and more terrorism ”.

(Translation by Stefania Mascetti)