OPINION | Biden’s reasons

Editor’s note: Carlos Alberto Montaner is a writer, journalist, and CNN contributor. His columns are published in dozens of newspapers in Spain, the United States and Latin America. Montaner is also vice president of the Liberal International. The opinions expressed here are solely his.

(CNN Spanish) – President Joe Biden affirms that his predecessor Donald Trump, when he invited the Taliban to Camp David in 2019 (a meeting that did not take place), left that Islamist group in the best military position it had had since 2001, the year in which Osama bin Laden, who had been sheltered, carried out the attack on the Twin Towers with al Qaeda.

According to the official statement from the White House, Trump planned to withdraw troops from Afghanistan around May 1, if he had won the elections. Something perfectly predictable. In any case, shortly before leaving the government, he reduced the US presence to 2,500 military personnel. Very few for the defense of the territory. So Biden had a terrible alternative: increase the number of soldiers or get out once and for all. He chose the second.

But he said more. He recalled that he was the fourth president of the United States to face this challenge – two Republicans and two Democrats – and that he was not willing to prolong the withdrawal so that a fifth president would be held accountable.

After all, it made no difference to extend the US presence for one or five years if the Afghan military failed to prevent the Taliban from succeeding. The only thing that cannot be invented, or projected from the outside, is the will to win and the Afghan military did not have it.

American soldiers have been in Afghanistan for almost 20 years and that has cost the US more than $ 2 trillion and more than 2,400 deaths.

Those of us who have experienced the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam experience déjà vu with that of Afghanistan. Those were Richard Nixon’s Republicans. These are Joe Biden’s Democrats, but the result is similar: America abandons a (lousy) ally in the middle of battle and walks away from a war it couldn’t win.

When the Marines leave, and take the last of the Americans (something that will happen in the next few days), as soon as there is no one to stop it in Kabul, it is very possible that the slaughter of civilians at the hands of the Taliban will begin. Among the victims will be some of the women trying to educate themselves, something the Taliban consider abominable.

It is true that engagement in Afghanistan has sparked the longest military intervention in U.S. history, and Biden’s conclusion that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan for a year or five didn’t matter, but it’s still a formidable defeat.

Could US forces withdraw without causing such a severe governance crisis? I listened to an interview on Radio Caracol with Ron Aledo, a US Army veteran and former intelligence adviser to the Afghan National Police analysts in Kabul during various missions. There Aledo affirmed that Biden had to choose to withdraw slowly by geographical sectors and not suddenly from all places at once.

Aledo was probably right, but for me the peak moment of the collapse of the Armed Forces occurred when then-President Ashraf Ghani “escaped” and that circumstance was not foreseeable. Why did he do it? Because President Mohammad Najibulá, a young doctor chosen by the Soviets to try to delay or disguise defeat at the hands of the Taliban, was cruelly tortured by the fighters before shooting him in 1996 when they entered Kabul. I think Ghani didn’t want the same to happen to him.