It doesn’t get more idiotic: “The Taliban also has to make an assessment about what they want their role to be in the international community,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said with a straight face Wednesday.
Oh, and the State Department has sent diplomats to “press the Taliban to stop their military offensive and to negotiate a political settlement, which is the only path to stability and development in Afghanistan.” They’re also begging to have the US Embassy in Kabul left alone, warning that future US aid is at risk — and so effectively promising that we’ll actually subsidize these barbarians.
Hello? The Taliban have never given a damn about world opinion or “stability and development.” They were a global pariah when they ruled Afghanistan in the ’90s, ignoring the handwringing as they crushed the country’s women, destroyed those 1,500-year-old Buddha statues and hosted the al Qaeda plotters of 9/11.
And they haven’t changed a whit since, blowing off all diplomatic efforts these last 20 years to get them to abandon their drive to reconquer the country.
These are fanatics out of the 10th century. They’re turning girls as young as 12 into sex slaves as they advance.
The Afghan army, meanwhile, is showing all the fortitude of the Iraqi forces who melted before ISIS in 2014: Provincial capitals (plural) are falling every day, with Nos. 10 (Herat) and 11 (Ghazni) gone Thursday. (To be fair, Afghan morale surely fell through the floor when Americans started literally abandoning bases in the middle of the night.)
Now it’s a race to Kabul, where Uncle Sam is desperately rushing to airlift out all Americans in a replay of the 1975 fall of Saigon.
The White House can pretend that diplomacy might somehow save the Afghan government, but its real sentiments rest in President Biden’s words while campaigning last year, when he said he’d have “zero responsibility” for what happened after he pulled US troops out.
We didn’t disagree with Biden’s move to remove the last US ground forces, just as Donald Trump promised as well when he was in office. That’s plainly what most Americans wanted, too. Afghanistan had become an endless war.
But any pullout had to have a plan. Not an utterly disastrous cut-and-run, with virtually no provision for the Afghans who worked with us all these years.
The Army of the Republic of South Vietnam fought off an invasion in 1972 — with the help of massive US air power; 1975 was a disaster because anti-war liberals in Congress prevented more airstrikes.
The same thing is happening now in Afghanistan. Adela Raz, the Afghan ambassador to the United States, is perfectly right to complain that current US air support is “extremely limited.” Nothing forced Biden to go soft there.
But the president said Tuesday he does “not regret” his decisions.
US presidents have been making mistakes on Afghanistan for two decades. But this rout is all on Biden.