thousands of interpreters who have risked their lived to work alongside American forces and who were promised visas in exchange? What about the chances of a Taliban-Al- Qaeda alliance again? If President Biden has a plan beyond using “beyond the horizon” (airstrike) assets to hit at terrorist groups from time to time, he’s not sharing it. It’s not even clear the dissolution of the Afghan government that the U.S. spent decades fostering will mean a political price for Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections back here in America. Unless there is blowback from Biden’s withdrawal that directly affects America – a terror strike, for example, planned on Afghan territory – it’s unlikely Biden’s political party will be forced to regret Afghanistan’s collapse. Americans of both parties have had enough . Right now, what we are seeing is the end of a “no good options” choice in Afghanistan that was delayed for two decades. “Only the dead have seen the end of war,” Plato once wrote. The Afghan people, who have suffered far too much in living memory, are being reminded of this truth. What remains to be seen is whether the U.S. has really seen the end of war in Afghanistan, or if our withdrawal is merely the interlude before another intervention and the generation of bloody conflict that comes with it.
I am briefed daily on the battlefield updates. Nearly 20 years of experience has shown us that the current security situation only confirms that “just one more year” of fighting in Afghanistan is not a solution but a recipe for being there indefinitely. It’s up to Afghans to make the decision about the future of their country. Indeed, it was up to the Afghans... which was a huge problem. Their incentives to fight absent U.S. funding and support disappeared. It turned out that, as the oft repeated saying goes, the Americans had all the watches, but the Taliban had all the time. ONLY THE DEAD SEE THE END In many ways, the most surprising part of Afghanistan’s unraveling has been the coordinated execution of the Taliban’s major offensive. The Taliban has clearly learned its lesson from the U.S. invasion of 2001 to 2002, when elite U.S. military units were able to bring U.S. airpower to devastating effect on the battlefield in partnership with the Northern Alliance. They didn’t make the same mistake. This time around, the Taliban left no holdouts against their power inside Afghan borders. Instead of focusing their offensive primarily in the traditional Pashtun-dominated south and east of the country, the primary thrust of their maneuvers has been in the north. These areas were the strongholds of U.S.-aligned warlords who were critical in rolling up the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom. So what now? What will happen to the
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