What is most striking and profoundly distressing about the recent events in Afghanistan – and the response of the international community, including the West led by the United States, and the rest, including India – is the pathetic wishful thinking that aggravates a horribly perilous situation that the Afghans find themselves in, only partly to their fault. It is the external intervention, since 1979, by America that has brought the people of Afghanistan to this sorry pass.
President Biden, who entered the White House with the best possible foreign policy credentials in the nation’s history, has painfully demonstrated that with the best resources, human and material, at one’s command it is possible to make the worst possible mistakes. He got obsessed with deadlines; first, proposed completion of withdrawal by 9/11: an unimaginative choice indeed. How can you mark the day with the worst attack on America in its history by withdrawing the American military from Afghanistan from where the Americans believe that the attack was planned?
Biden took the right decision to withdraw the military from Afghanistan. However, he went about the implementation in a hare-brained fashion, disregarding the advice of his Secretary of Defence. We do not exactly know what the Secretary of State might have advised.
Let us list Biden’s major mistakes for which Afghans and others are paying a heavy price, mistakes that could have been avoided by the application of commonsense:
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