France — Afghanistan: Joe Biden has bet on the American defeat from the start

 

By Frédéric Mas, Contrepoints

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The state of grace is over! Joe Biden no longer has Donald Trump to show off differences from him, 
and the media that went to war with the former Republican president no longer have to portray 
Biden as the savior of the American Republic. Worse, his popularity collapsed after the pitiful 
departure of US troops from Afghanistan.

The humiliating endpoint of a 20-year war was echoed on social media around the world with the 
lift-off of the Chinook helicopter from the US Embassy. Some commentators have linked the event 
to the American defeat in Vietnam: in both cases, the prestige of American military might took a 
big hit.

The image is strong but alone sums up the precipitous retreat of the leading country of the Atlantic 
coalition in the face of the advance of the Taliban. The US military left behind state-of-the-art 
equipment, biometric and personal data of thousands of Afghans, mining operations capable of 
securing the future of the new regime and of course the regular Afghan army, which did not not even 
make the effort to defend Kabul after the collapse of the Washington-backed puppet government.

ENDING AN ENDLESS WAR

The American departure from Afghanistan was not programmed by Joe Biden, but by his 
predecessor, Donald Trump, who had promised to end "an endless war". The initiative was laudable, 
since there was no war goal to justify this tragic war worth more than 2 trillion dollars. Only the 
deadline negotiated with the Taliban was impossible to meet, and despite the deadline set by Biden, 
it resulted in a disorderly, underhanded and inglorious execution.

But Joe Biden's responsibility does not end there: before becoming president, he was vice-president 
for Barack Obama. It was under the latter's chairmanship that in 2009 a plan was launched for 
America to resume leadership in the allied coalition against the Taliban.

Concretely, as Michel Goya lucidly recalls in an article from 2014 which has unfortunately not lost its 
topicality, this resulted in the opening of the floodgates of dollars:

“The plan also means a surge in US military spending to the tune of $ 1 billion every four days. The 
war in Afghanistan in turn becomes after Iraq a "trillion dollar war", which is not without effect on 
the economic health of the United States and therefore of the world. "

AFGHANISTAN: A TRAGEDY AND A FINANCIAL CHASM

But the Obama/Biden administration was not only turning the Afghan conflict into a financial 
abyss, it was preparing for retirement and negotiation with the Taliban, preparing, that is, for 
today's humanitarian crisis: for Andrew McCarthy, who engages in a detailed analysis in the 
National Review, Joe Biden has resigned himself to this solution for years, which he considers a 
lesser evil, because he knows the unmanageable and inevitable war creates the need to negotiate 
with the terrorists to limit breakage:

“The president has been determined for years to allow the Taliban to take control of Afghanistan. He 
hoped that, when the inevitable happened, the Taliban would crave international legitimacy - the 
transnational-progressive gold standard - and therefore behave (relatively speaking) well in taking 
control. In the meantime, when in his power to do so, Biden set out to win the Taliban to his cause 
with shocking concessions and accommodations, including sabotaging the Afghan government and 
security forces, which has eased the Taliban's path to Kabul. In the end, they barely had to fire a shot 
to take power. "

For the American journalist, the help for the diplomatic recognition of the Taliban by the Obama 
administration, especially in Doha in 2013, delegitimized the Afghan regime installed after the 
American victory and accredited the fact that the Taliban would inevitably succeed it.

And this is just one episode in the complete lack of support Biden subsequently offered to Afghan 
forces allied to the Western coalition.

The resignation of the Democrats, which responded to the blind warmongering of the 
neoconservatives, is now likely to weaken the United States on the international stage.

Frédéric Mas is a journalist and editor-in-chief of Contrepoints.org.