Washington:
The Taliban are producing swift gains in Afghanistan but President Joe Biden is standing firm on a US exit with restricted choices appearing to be on the table to reverse the insurgents’ momentum.
The Taliban’s advances, which includes seizing six provincial capitals inside days, might seem startling in their speed but have been not unexpected in Washington as the US military completes the pullout ordered by Biden by August 31.
“The decision to withdraw was made in full knowledge that what we are seeing happen now was likely to happen,” mentioned Laurel Miller, till 2017 the US specific representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
For Biden, who lengthy championed ending America’s longest-ever war, there is a cold calculation — absolutely nothing more could be accomplished and the United States lengthy ago achieved its stated objective of defeating Al-Qaeda in the area following the September 11, 2001 attacks, even though the Taliban have but to reduce their ties with the group.
“Nearly 20 years of experience has shown us,” Biden mentioned last month, “that ‘just one more year’ of fighting in Afghanistan is not a solution but a recipe for being there indefinitely.”
Keep up air strikes?
The United States plans to maintain arming and education the Afghan military but one essential query is whether or not it will carry out air strikes against the Taliban following August 31.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby confirmed Monday that US bombing sorties backed Afghan allies last week but indicated there was no selection to do so following the withdrawal, with the administration previously saying air energy would be restricted to counterterrorism operations.
“It’s their country to defend. This is their struggle,” Kirby mentioned, even though acknowledging the scenario is “clearly not going in the right direction.”
The administration is also warning the Taliban that they threat becoming a pariah if they take more than by force — even even though the militant Islamist group was internationally isolated when ruling a great deal of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.
The pariah argument is “the leverage that the administration is leaning heavily on because that’s the leverage they’ve got,” mentioned Miller, now Asia plan director at the International Crisis Group.
“The Taliban, I think, would prefer to have legitimacy and financial assistance from the international community. But their number one preference is gaining power.”
For the government, she mentioned, the most effective-case situation is to force a stalemate with the Taliban and then seek a political settlement.
Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia plan at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, doubted that the United States had the indicates to turn the tide now that it is withdrawing.
“I fear that the Taliban is just so strong and the Afghan military is so beleaguered right now, it’s going to be hard to find some type of momentum changer from the US,” he mentioned.
Aaron David Miller, a veteran US policymaker now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, mentioned that air strikes can not win the war.
“All they can do is maybe stop from outright losing one — an unacceptable outcome that has basically been the story of US policy there for two decades,” he wrote on Twitter.
Public sours on war
The Taliban when in energy notoriously imposed a violent, ultra-austere brand of Islam on Afghanistan, banning music and severely restricting ladies and girls.
But Biden, like his predecessor Donald Trump, has repeatedly mentioned that the United States was not out to develop a nation and has accused the Kabul government, with its internal feuds and allegations of corruption, of failing to meet the moment.
“US public opinion today is either opposed to the war or unaware of the war,” Kugelman mentioned.
The terrorism threat to the United States out of Afghanistan remains restricted, he mentioned, even if more fighting could have devastating effects in the area which includes via a new exodus of refugees.
“So I think that if you would see a worst-case scenario developing where the Taliban was threatening to take over Afghanistan on the whole, I don’t think that would shift the calculus for the administration,” Kugelman mentioned.
“I think that for the administration, the political cost would be higher if troops were to be sent back to Afghanistan after they’d been removed.”
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