I have found the whole things extremely harrowing, distressing, and down right appalling to watch on both humanitarian and political levels.
I was always against us going into Afghanistan in the first place. But hindsight is something which is utterly worthless and hollow.
I have struggled with this a lot in the past few weeks. Between Trump who made a deal and Biden who believes generally believes in returning the US to pre-wwII 'splendid isolationism' ideals (post colonial America if you will) and felt he also had no choice but to honour the deal or make the situation worse for numerous reasons its been hard to get my head around.
I think these two articles have been amongst the best to kind of make sense of why we are leaving.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-58071592?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=KARANGA
Bilal Sarwary: 'The plane hit the tower and all our lives changed'
This is an article written by an Afghan who became a journalist and now works for the BBC. He cites the fact that the problem is that the US didnt know when to quit - they should have done years ago and they missed the opportunity for Afghans to rebuild their country.
Its a compelling article.
theprint.in/opinion/my-father-was-right-20-years-ago-governing-afghanistan-as-unified-country-was-impossible/717213/
My father was right 20 years ago — governing Afghanistan as unified country was impossible
If the US effort in Afghanistan was doomed from the start, then the return of the Taliban was always inevitable. What isn’t inevitable is Afghanistan will become a terrorist haven again.
This is an opinion piece from a journalist whose father lived in Afghanistan in the 1960s.
His father said that the Americans were taking on an impossible task from the beginning:
“So we need to stay to establish a functioning government,” I continued.
“It can’t be done,” my father explained.
He didn’t just mean that conquerors from Alexander the Great to the British Empire to the Soviet Union had failed.
He meant that even Afghans had never really run their country from the center. When my parents had been there in 1969, the king was effectively little more than the mayor of Kabul. My father remembered him driving around the putative capital city at the wheel of a Volkswagen Beetle.
On the road to Herat, my parents had encountered tribesmen who, my father recalled, were so unaware of the affairs of the country as a whole that they expressed no interest in the word “Afghanistan” — or maybe they had never heard the word at all.
The central argument being that Afghanistan hasn't really ever functioned as a single entity and is instead made up of small vying power bases of tribes that don't have a central cause nor leader to unite around. And never really have. Its food for thought in a lot of ways.
These are voices of people who know the country. And love the country. And yet they see the West as never really understanding the country.
I think one of the other really compelling arguments is knowing that the US has killed more civilians in Afghanistan than the Taliban. This gives things a different perspective.
This doesn't mean that the West hasn't betrayed and abandoned and made a pigs ear of the withdrawal. They absoluetely have fucked it up. They've thrown allies and friends to the wolves.
But the idea that we can do very much more at this point and help people stuck on the ground is perhaps naive.
I think thats the word that best sums up the last 20 years in Afghanistan full stop. Naive.
I don't know what could be done to improve the situation. I think the gross misunderstanding of the country and how it functioned culturally was the problem from the word go and little has changed.
Thats kinda the point...
...and the problem.