On [July 8] (https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/07/08/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-drawdown-of-u-s-forces-in-afghanistan/), in an official White House Press Briefing, a peculiar question was posed to President Joe Biden: could we draw a parallel between the horrors of the Vietnam War and the hellscape that might unfold in Afghanistan after the U.S. withdraws its military presence?

President Biden immediately dismissed the premise of the question by saying there was absolutely “zero” equivalence between the current circumstances and those that unfolded in [Saigon back in 1975] (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/13/afghanistan-kabul-evacuations-1975-vietnam-war-saigon-taliban).

However, as the Taliban continues to sweep through chunks of Afghan land, including the capital Kabul, with lightning speed, it is clear that the United States has planted the seeds of a humanitarian crisis through the systemic collapse of the very intelligence mechanisms designed to prevent this scenario. The [visuals of civilians] (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/21/world/asia/afghanistan-kabul-fear-taliban.html) hanging off military aircrafts, left to their own devices in what remains of the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul evoke a sense of collective guilt and compel us to reminisce about the [barbaric days of 1996] (https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/06/30/you-have-no-right-complain/education-social-restrictions-and-justice-taliban-held).

In 2001, the U.S. decided to intervene owing to the [Taliban allegedly] (https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/08/twenty-years-war/496736/) maintaining a safe haven for the masterminds of 9/11. [Having been engaged in the country for approximately 20 years] (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/20/afghanistan-war-key-numbers/), the U.S. further exacerbated violence, which consequently led to civilians bearing the burden of collateral damage. [A report published] (https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/01/29/afgh-j29.html) by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) also highlighted the United States’ long-running complicity in the enslavement and rape of Afghan children.

The logical question that follows is: what idiocy within the well-established U.S. foreign policy departments led to this tragic string of tragic events?

The United States has a problem that can be broken down into two branches. The first is a culture of political finger-pointing and partisan blame game that has incubated a state of affairs where representatives across the isle thrive on inconsistency and hypocrisy. This is evident through the manner in which [conservative Republicans] (https://www.c-span.org/video/?514185-1/representative-cheney-taliban-takeover-afghanistan), who claim to be staunch proponents of the [Bush Doctrine] (https://carnegieendowment.org/2002/10/07/bush-doctrine-pub-1088) today, supported negotiations with a [“terrorist group”] (https://www.state.gov/foreign-terrorist-organizations/) just a year before. On the other hand, progressive Democrats lauding President Biden for his decision to withdraw from the country previously supported an increase in military funding to Afghanistan back during the days of the [Obama administration] (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/08/23/presidents-policies-afghanistan-bush-biden/8245394002/).

The most aggravating aspect of the current fiasco is how its apologists, both on the conventionally demarcated left and right of the political spectrum, insist on being sober realists. They maintain that the U.S. should put a cork on [“endless wars”] (https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2021/08/16/the-talibans-victory-proves-the-west-has-failed-to-learn-the-lessons-of-the-past/) and go to war only when it is in their self-interest, forgetting that this is precisely why they attacked Afghanistan in the first place. Fuelling this fire of apathy and lack of concern, are successive presidential attempts to reassert dominance in the arena of foreign policy that have seldom led to exemplary policy resolutions.

An example of this is Trump’s America First policy, which induced the atrocious [Doha Deal] (https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Agreement-For-Bringing-Peace-to-Afghanistan-02.29.20.pdf) between the United States and Taliban by deliberately excluding the de jure Afghan government led by Ashraf Ghani. The deal gave the U.S. a free pass to withdraw troops [in exchange for prisoner releases and flimsy counterterrorism assurances] (https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-taliban-peace-deal-agreement-afghanistan-war). However this perilous move tipped the scale of power in Afghanistan by giving tremendous strategic and political leverage to the Taliban and virtually [legitimizing their ruthless actions] (https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/south-asia/afghanistan/report-afghanistan/). In the wake of coming to power, while [President Biden reversed almost every executive order passed by President Trump] (https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/politics/biden-executive-orders/), he was unequivocally determined to move forward with troop withdrawal.

The second problem is the structure of military intervention. The U.S. has rarely allowed transitional governments to develop state capacity of their own, to ensure their survival after the end of the transition period.The foremost example of this precariousness is the crumbling of the Afghan National Army in merely 11 days. The U.S. has also done next to nothing in terms of providing long-term military training and promoting Afghan autonomy in a political sense. They rarely encouraged the upcoming generation of young and educated Afghan leaders and instead consistently provided assistance to the highest echelon of the Afghan political establishment, which is caught [in a whirlwind of corruption allegations] (https://thediplomat.com/2021/08/taliban-take-kabul-via-path-paved-by-corruption/) and misallocation of funds.

Overall, I would not hesitate to rank this blunder as one of America’s greatest contemporary failures. History has stood witness to the fact that foreign adventurism of this kind has, on no occasion, established stable nations, be it in Iraq, Libya or Syria. The Taliban are en route to establishing an excessively barbaric regime and the West watches the spectacle in silence. One which they birthed.