Anyone who has seen the videos of the panicked crowds at the airport in Kabul these days will hardly be able to forget them. These are images that Joe Biden and his government were determined to prevent.
Read more: Taliban Will Allow Access & The Fear Of The Neighbors
The withdrawal of the Americans from Afghanistan should by no means be a reminder of the shameful escape from Saigon in April 1975, when diplomats and staff had to be rescued from the roof of the US embassy by helicopters. "This is obviously not Saigon," asserted Biden's Foreign Minister Antony Blinken last Sunday, when the Taliban were already occupying Kabul.
Blinken is right: Kabul is not Saigon. It's worse, in some ways.
The lost war in Vietnam was a terrible humiliation for the USA, but it did nothing to change the fact that it was the undisputed leading power of the West. A few years later, they won the Cold War and celebrated the "end of history".
America of 2021 is a shaky world power
The lost war in Afghanistan appears even more like a historical turning point. It marks the end of an era that began with 9/11 : a time of neo-imperialism in which the USA and its Western allies, driven by a vigorous sense of mission, wanted to shape the rest of the world according to their example.
Read also: The West Failed, But It Was Not Solely To Blame
This feeling of strength in the West had already been noticeably exhausted in recent years; in its place came growing nervousness. Biden was barely in office when he proclaimed the systems' contest against China. The US is back, he has been repeating at every opportunity since then. After the chaos of the Trump years, they are ready again to lead the democracies of the world.
But the America of the year 2021 is a world power that revolves around itself and wobbles. And Biden , of all people, who wanted to do everything better, acted in Afghanistan as if he were Donald Trump: factually imprecise, arrogant, intoxicated with his own image. He insisted that the withdrawal of the troops must be completed on the 20th anniversary of September 11th. Why so hastily, without consulting your allies, without a sensible strategy? And why just in the middle of the fighting season? The war has always followed a seasonal pattern: the Taliban advanced in the summerbefore, in winter they waited. If the Americans had held out just a few months longer, they would have been able to prepare the Afghan armed forces better during the break. Morally too, because the message would have been: America cares about us. America is reliable.
Biden as executor of Trump's policy: By now at the latest, the hopes of many transatlantic people are likely to be destroyed, Trump's presidency could only have been an aberration.
The fact that the western powers could not win in Afghanistan could no longer be denied. But it was precisely from this fact that the responsibility arose to at least prepare the trigger as carefully as possible. Biden's decision prevented this - and took the allies by surprise, including the Germans, who had fought on the side of the United States over the years. With helpless horror they now look at a drama for which they bear part of the responsibility.
Read more: The Taliban Are Erasing What The West Has Achieved
The failure of the Western alliance in Afghanistan will probably benefit all those powers that regard the West as an enemy or rival. Radical Islamists, Iran, Russia - not least China, which is already sending friendly signals to the Taliban and warnings to Taiwan: Those who rely on the West will be betrayed.
It is the bitter truth: those Afghans who believed in the strength and ideals of the West are paying a terrible price. Our noble goal of bringing democracy into the world has in the end shrunk to the pitiful hope of saving a few people from a cruel death. These days one can wonder whether the West still exists.
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