New York – The most tragic day of the last decade for Americans in Afghanistan also marks the lowest point reached so far by Joe Biden. But there are no glorious retreats. And it cannot be a good show, the abandonment of the periphery of an empire that was now above the real strength of America, as well as inadequate for the challenges of tomorrow. Biden appears as a transitional figure, with the near impossible mission to downsize the US global role without it appearing too humiliating. On this August 27, 2021, the death toll of 13 deaths among “his boys” sticks to him and persecutes him.
Biden did what he could and what is in his strings to console a grieving nation. His personal history full of family tragedies, having a military son who risked his life at the front, makes his empathy credible and not artificial.
The fact that he was Barack Obama’s deputy in the Situation Room when Osama Bin Laden was killed also makes his promise to do justice by hitting those responsible for the massacre quite reliable. But the Al Qaeda leader was executed on May 2, 2011, almost ten years after the 9/11 attack. Can Biden quench the thirst for justice faster? The most virtuous scenario includes an active role of the Taliban, interested in getting accredited abroad and perhaps even in unlocking some funds seized in American banks. Effective help from the Taliban on the ground could perhaps help punish ISIS-K terrorists in the near future.
But not even the Taliban are omnipotent on the ground, so much so that Afghanistan has continued to be the scene of attacks and massacres against the civilian population, even during that truce in which NATO forces were spared. What Biden excludes is to send other troops on a mission to hunt down terrorists: it would be another way to give the Pentagon victory and return to the scenario of the “Hundred Years War”, as John McCain called it (a hawk republican who was an iron ally of the generals, but to the point of drawing the extreme consequences of their plan: to transform Afghanistan into a colony or a US protectorate). Each additional day that six thousand American soldiers stay at the Kabul airport is one more day in which they are potential targets for new attacks. Then there is the “drone” scenario, that is, a hunt for ISIS-K terrorists entrusted to technological weapons, without risking the lives of the soldiers. In the past, however, we know that drones have also failed to aim; and their effectiveness is often proportional to the quality of intelligence on the ground, an intelligence that Americans will find less and less in that area.
Kabul, Molinari: “The ISIS offensive threatens to transform Afghanistan into a failed state”
Biden holds out, therefore, the evacuation mission must end on schedule. if any Americans remain behind, stuck in Afghanistan for some reason after August 31, then other methods will be sought to “extract” him and bring him to safety, but without risking the lives of thousands of soldiers.
The chorus of criticism against him is becoming more and more deafening. Republicans pronounce the word impeachment, as was to be expected in a country where “their” leader suffered two in a single term. With 13 dead on his conscience, the supreme commander of the armed forces who is the president of the United States is necessarily stained, weakened. Holding on to the long-term project is perhaps the only thing left to do, in the hope that the long times of history will give birth to a different judgment. Sometimes history plays tricks on those who keep their eyes glued to current events. The fall of Hanoi in 1975 – often misrepresented in comparisons with the Kabul debacle – was followed 14 years later by the American triumph in the Cold War.
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