Biden by withdrawing troops threw the situation back 20 years
Thirteen American soldiers were killed in terrorist attacks near the Kabul airport and more than a thousand civilians were injured – a tragic result on August 26. US President Biden was forced to make an emergency speech: the American army has never had such losses in one day in ten years. The war continues.
Photo: AP
Twenty years ago, after the September 11 attacks, under President Bush Jr., the Americans invaded Afghanistan. Without waiting for the sad anniversary, President Biden was determined to withdraw US troops from this country, which immediately fell into the hands of radical Islamists from the Taliban (a terrorist organization banned in the Russian Federation). By itself, the hasty departure of the star-spangled army, accompanied by scenes of panic and chaos at the Kabul airport, gave grounds to talk about a catastrophe. But the explosions that took place on Thursday, which claimed dozens of lives, made the situation much worse.
With all the overlaps, with all the confusion, probably inevitable during evacuation operations of this scale, which the US military and its allies had to face at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, the Americans managed to avoid casualties among their personnel (and the fact that local residents were dying, desperately trying to cling to transport planes leaving the Afghan land-in Washington, they regretted the fate of the unfortunate, but they did not make a big tragedy out of it).
And if the Americans, without losses on their part, managed to hold out until August 31, when their president promised to take the rest of the contingent out of Afghanistan, then with all the “buts”, with all the criticism from opponents, Joe Biden had the right to say to his compatriots: “We left without losing our people. The war is over, forget it! ”
But then the Taliban’s competitors in the jihadist field flew up to the Kabul airport like a “black swan” – the Afghan branch of ISIL (“Islamic State” is a terrorist organization banned in the Russian Federation), whose militants staged a massacre, killing everyone who was there: Afghan civilians, Taliban fighters and American soldiers.
Such a number of US servicemen killed in one day has never been lost in a decade! The last time so many Americans died was when militants shot down a Chinook helicopter with a rocket in August 2011. For more than a year in Afghanistan, after the conclusion of agreements between Washington and the Taliban in Qatar, American forces did not suffer any combat losses at all.
And then – thirteen dead at once! Those who died at the very end of the troops ‘ stay in Afghanistan!
Video of the explosion at the Kabul airport was published
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As the retired American Colonel Douglas McGregor put it about the tragedy in Kabul, “it all looks like Benghazi on steroids.” In 2012, during an attack by militants, the US ambassador and several other Americans were killed in Benghazi, Libya.
The Afghan catastrophe, in terms of its impact on the future of not only the country abandoned by the Americans, not only the surrounding regions, but also the whole world after the terrorist attacks on August 26, was multiplied by at least two.
If earlier the beneficiaries of the withdrawal of US troops were the “Taliban”, who not only arranged a revenge, but also turned into a “winner of a superpower”, now everything becomes even scarier.
After all, the Taliban, with their promises to become more “civilized”, could at least take a moderate path. Now, in all its “glory”, the star of the “Islamic State”rises over Afghanistan – the one whose victories in Syria and Iraq were so proud of in Washington. The bombings at the Kabul airport will be used by the propaganda of this transnational terrorist network around the world as evidence that it is too early to bury ISIS, since the militants of this group are killing American soldiers.
And Joe Biden understands this very well. You can’t envy the US President: he found himself between the Scylla of his promised withdrawal from Afghanistan (with the motivation “So that our guys don’t die anymore”) and the Charybdis of the inevitability of retribution for the death of 13 servicemen.
Here the White House did not even play zero – the result is obtained with a negative amount.
Hence-Biden’s threats to ” wet “the perpetrators of the Kabul terrorist attacks in the spirit of “we will not forget, we will not forgive”. The US President said so directly, addressing the terrorists: “We will not forgive, we will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.”
“We will respond with force and precision at the time, in the place that we choose, at the moment we choose,” Biden threatened.
Even CNN, which is sympathetic to the Democrats, found parallels here with the speech of George W. Bush, delivered at a prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral a few days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (“This conflict began on time and on conditions determined by others – it will end this way and at the hour that we choose”).
The story looped around, returning to the starting point. Yes, the Americans dictated their own conditions. And they even decided that the deadline they had chosen for their presence in Afghanistan – August 31, 2021 – was the very end that crowned the case.
Yes, twenty years ago, the 9/11 terrorist attacks were avenged by the American invasion of Afghanistan, from where the Taliban, who ruled the country at that time, refused to hand over Osama bin Laden to Washington. In the fall of 2001, the Taliban lost power and was driven into mountain shelters. In the spring of 2011, Osama was taken out by American special forces in Abbotabad, Pakistan. It would seem that everything is a point! Game is over!
But it turned out to be an ellipsis…
And now, in August 2021, the Taliban – in fact, with the frank connivance of the United States-triumphantly return to Kabul. And the American military in the same Afghanistan a few days before the final evacuation is killed by terrorists.
President Biden threatens the murderers of American soldiers with inevitable retribution – and this means that the war is not over. The war continues. The game just moved to the next level. So what has America spent the last twenty years, trillions of dollars and thousands of lives on?
A series of explosions in Kabul claimed more than a hundred lives: footage from the scene
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