Twenty years later, the grim, bloody balance sheet of not responding “the same old way” speaks for itself. Six wars, millions killed, trillions wasted, and a plague of suffering and trauma inflicted on the Muslim world, accelerating a tidal wave of refugees that has created panic in the European Union and resulted in a huge increase of votes for far-right parties—which in turn has pushed an already extreme political center further to the right. Islamophobia, promoted by politicians of every stripe in the West, is now embedded in Western culture.
“Oh may no more a foreign master’s rage / With wrongs yet legal, curse a future age!” wrote Alexander Pope at the dawn of the 18th century. Three hundred years later, the foreign master has withdrawn its forces, admitting defeat, with the full realization that the Taliban would soon be back in power. The war has been a huge political and military catastrophe for the US and its NATO camp followers. “Freedom” did not endure. The Taliban, which controlled three-quarters of the country on the eve of the US invasion, now control all of it.
History is only modestly helpful for anticipating what happens next. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, a weak pro-Moscow regime managed to hold on to Kabul for some years before it was toppled, with US support, and replaced by warring factions of the mujahideen. In 1994, the US gave the go-ahead to a Pakistani-led Taliban intervention. Two years later, the Taliban took over Kabul.
The difference today is that there is no armed Cold War enemy as far as the US is concerned. The Taliban, once Washington’s friend, then an enemy, is now willing to be friends again. After all, the two have been talking for over a decade.
Meanwhile, in July, a senior Taliban delegation visited China to pledge that Afghan soil would never again be used as a base to attack China and, no doubt, to discuss future trade and investment plans. Make no mistake, Beijing will replace Washington as the primary foreign influence in Afghanistan. Since China enjoys warm relations with Iran, we can hope that it will discourage rivalries between the minority Hazaras and the majority Pashtuns that might lead to bloodshed. Russia, for its part, will use its influence with other minorities to avoid the kind of civil war that broke out after the Soviet withdrawal. No outside power appears to want a repeat of that today. The US prefers to exercise direct control via drones and bombing raids, as it did a day after confirming the withdrawal from Afghanistan—to “buy time” for the Afghan government, we were informed—and as it did at least twice since the deadly ISIS-K airport attacks.