US President Joe Biden affirmed in his address to the nation on Monday that he was bound by the Trump administration’s agreement with the Taliban to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan. However, this argument has multiple flaws.
First, the Taliban never respected the terms of that agreement, including that they would sever ties with al Qaeda. According to a UN report released earlier this year, they did not.
Second, the agreement said that the Taliban would enter into real peace negotiations with the Afghan government. That didn’t happen either.
Third, the agreement between the United States and the Taliban was negotiated without any input from the Government of Afghanistan, which, after all, was the country’s elected government. Conveniently for the Taliban, they don’t believe in elections.
So the Biden administration felt compelled to honor an agreement made by the previous administration with an insurgent group that had excluded the royal government of Afghanistan.
But not long before that, the Trump administration got rid of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which was negotiated by the Obama administration with a sovereign state and with some of the United States’ closest allies, the British, the French, and the Germans. . That deal was actually being respected by the Iranians, according to the American intelligence community.
That didn’t stop Trump from abandoning the Iranian nuclear deal, in 2018, which he often described as a terrible deal, even though it was actually working.
Afghans Can’t Stand Alone Against Taliban, Says AnalystNow, the Biden administration is saying it had to adhere to Trump’s genuinely terrible deal with the Taliban, even though it wasn’t working at all.
What the administration has done in Afghanistan doesn’t make much sense. Biden could have easily said that the Taliban had reneged on their agreement with the United States so that they could continue to maintain a relatively small US military force in Afghanistan to advise and assist the country’s Army and support the Afghan Air Force to thwart advances. Taliban.
But Biden also believes in the benefits of leaving Afghanistan regardless of Trump’s deal with the Taliban. He argues that the US cannot be bogged down in endless wars, although the US presence in Afghanistan has been reduced to just 2,500 troops, especially few for a force of 1.3 million active-duty US servicemen. The force helped sustain the Afghan military physically and psychologically, mostly with close air support.
Now, the Biden government unilaterally withdrew the presence of US troops in Afghanistan, which has sapped the morale of the Afghan military and population. It also precipitated the departure of thousands of Western-allied soldiers, as well as the many thousands of contractors in Afghanistan who, among other things, kept the national Air Force aloft.
And now the white flags of the Taliban are flying across Afghanistan. It didn’t have to be this way.