Almost exactly five years earlier, on 15 August 2021, the Taliban seized this airport. Chaos ensued. The Americans carried out an 18-day operation in which more than 123,000 people were airlifted to safety — the largest non-combatant evacuation in U.S. military history. On 30 August, at 11:59pm local time, the final US military plane departed Kabul, one minute before President Joe Biden’s deadline for withdrawal.

The airlift marked the end of the American-Afghan state that was born in 2001, when the US, aiming to hunt down Osama bin Laden and overthrow his Taliban allies, invaded the country and installed a Western-style government. For 20 years, this US-backed state persisted, but its unraveling took mere weeks. Everything Washington had built in the country, notably a national army, proved to be a mirage that vanished in the face of a resurgent Taliban. The regime now celebrates 31 August as the day of liberation from US occupation. Each year, parades weave through Kabul’s central squares. Celebratory gunfire sounds across the city.

Today, the capital is a mix of urban squalor and state repression. Armed Talibs patrol the streets while beggar children work the traffic, tapping insistently at windows and thrusting out supplicant hands. On Chicken Street in the city center, homeless girls play beneath brightly colored shopfronts selling trinkets and carpets to a small but growing trickle of tourists. “Things are much safer now the Taliban are in control, and there is no war,” says a local who doesn’t wish to be named. “But we have lost a lot of freedoms. That is the bargain we now live under.”

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He’s right. The streets are calm. Taliban are polite – friendly even. But I am aware that this is a state beholden only to itself. People can, and are, regularly disappeared into its prisons and torture chambers without warning or due process.

Still, to understand the Taliban, you must understand where they come from. Kabul may be Afghanistan’s capital, but Kandahar, a city in the country’s south, is the Islamic Emirate’s spiritual and political center. Here its Supreme Leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, and his circle of advisers rule, largely hidden from public view. I make my way there down the  300-mile Kabul-Kandahar highway, which cuts through vast stretches of arid plateau and dust-blown steppe. I pass goat-hair tents belonging to Afghanistan’s semi-nomadic Kuchi people and flocks of threadbare sheep. Mud-brick villages whizz past, their flat roofs and earth-colored walls almost indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape.

As I approach the city’s outskirts, three small girls swing incense burners, sending coils of smoke billowing skyward. The ritual is said to keep away evil spirits. In the city center, the heat is intense. Taliban flags fly everywhere. Men swathed in black keffiyehs emerge through clouds of dust kicked up by their motorbikes. Women are begging in full burqas. The poverty of Kandahar, to say nothing of the theocratic intensity, makes Kabul look like San Francisco. I am told that photography is banned.

My first stop is the Ministry of Information and Culture, where I’m seeking permission to report in Kandahar. It’s roasting hot in the carpeted waiting room. In the corner, two men are carving up a huge melon. I am offered a glass jar of pear drops – the Taliban’s love of 1950s British sweets is one of the more surprising discoveries of my trip – and told that I’m in luck. A senior local official, Inamullah Samangani, has decided to grant me a spontaneous interview.

After a few minutes, I am summoned to an air-conditioned office next door. Four Talibs, one of whom is cradling an M16 rifle, are sitting barefoot on sofas. Cold melon and water are served to everyone. Samangani is an ethnic Tajik from the country’s north. He has a smooth, youthful face with a manicured mustache and tufty beard. He beams at me.

I ask him how he feels as the fifth anniversary approaches. “All our people are happy,” he replies. “This is what we wanted. After 20 years of war, this anniversary is very meaningful for us.”

What the Taliban want, he tells me, is peace and prosperity for the nation. “Afghanistan has been at war for more than 40 years. Afghanistan needs a great deal of rebuilding and construction, and we are working on this.”

What are the biggest challenges facing this new Islamic Emirate? “The situation is not normal because of the war and because of Western policies towards Afghanistan. The military war has ended, but an economic war continues. We want peace not only for Afghanistan but for our neighboring countries, the region and the world.”

I ask what he attributes the Taliban’s success to. “Our belief in Allah,” he replies without hesitation. “And our belief from the first day that we were on the right path. After September 11, when America and its allies occupied Afghanistan, we knew that freedom was our first and last choice. After 20 years, we achieved it.”

The interview ends; it’s clear that Samangani is more concerned with painting the Islamic Emirate as a reasonable partner with whom the international community can do business than getting into the realities of life here — and in this, he is like politicians everywhere. I make my way out of the office, passing a small room where a Talib is sitting on the floor, clipping his toenails.

Outside, armed men saunter in groups. Printed on a billboard overlooking a roundabout is a message from the Supreme Leader. “When you return from Hajj, don’t be wasteful by spending money on dinners and celebrations,” it warns.

The following morning, I set off from my guest house to meet Zabihullah Mujahid, chief spokesman for the Taliban government since 25 October 2021. He became a Taliban spokesman, and a senior government official, in January 2007, during the insurgency against the US-backed Afghan government. Even as he claimed responsibility on behalf of the Taliban for attacks on coalition forces, he remained faceless and pseudonymous. But on 17 August 2021, two days after Kabul fell, he revealed himself publicly. Now he is the regime’s international face.

For security reasons, I am not initially told Mujahid’s location. Instead, I am instructed to wait for a call. As I sit in a nearby cafe, my eyes scan the room until they settle on a pair of decorative screens. One depicts two camels, the other a peacock, the faces of all three creatures covered with stickers. I’m confused until I realize why: the defacing accords with the hadith-based injunction against complete representations of dhawāt al-arwāḥ (“beings possessing souls”). If you obscure the head, you render the figure incomplete and therefore permissible. I saw nothing like this in Kabul.

The call comes; the venue is a gated residence just across the road. I walk into a spacious garden, where a flunky is watering a comparatively lush lawn. Inside, I am shown into a large room and asked to wait.

After a few minutes, Mujahid enters and sits down. He is immaculate in a white shalwar kameez with dark blue waistcoat and brown, patterned turban. Five years on, he tells me, the Taliban’s victory has brought what Afghans wanted most. “No war, no fighting, and a unified government in place.”

But victory has also forced the Taliban to govern, not just fight. Its foot soldiers and clerics, formed in the madrassas and mountains, must also now serve as policemen, civil servants and diplomats. They must manage budgets and rebuild infrastructure. For this they need international recognition, and aid money from international organizations and Western countries — above all, the US. “We definitely want good relations with the USA,” Mujahid tells me. “We have tried, but they have to try as well.”

Recognition has not been forthcoming. I ask Mujahid about the first government press conference he gave in 2021, when he promised that women would be able to work and study within the bounds of Islamic law. Girls have since been excluded from secondary schools and women from universities.

“I said that everything would be according to Sharia,” he replies, maintaining a serious demeanor and a quiet, even tone of voice throughout. “I still say that. Human rights, education — everything.”

Women still work in hospitals, schools, banks and government, he says, before adding that the exclusion of girls from secondary education, now approaching its fifth year, is “only a slight disruption in the education system”. The Emirate is working to find a way for women to study “with the necessary segregation, transport and safeguards”.

The matter of women’s rights is a serious problem for the government — even among its supporters.  Mainstream Islamic law does not ban the education of women; even hardline theocracies such as Saudi Arabia have eased the restrictions on women in recent years. Afghans are furious. In Kabul, on my second day in the country, I met a man out walking with his three daughters. “We have seen a lot of improvements in different sectors and in the rebuilding of our country,” he told me. “But there are big limitations for girls. They should be able to go to school. This is a big ambition of every Afghan. We hope the government will listen to the voice of our citizens.”

But the Taliban will not budge. I suspect Mujahid will be giving the same answers to the same questions five years from now.

I ask him about another contentious issue. In Kandahar, fiber-optic internet has been cut off to private homes. Mujahid insists this is not an internet ban, but a means of ensuring internet use stays within Sharia guidelines. “With mobile internet we can [control it] to a degree,” he explains, “but with fiber-optic Wi-Fi it is harder.”

Every Talib I meet echoes what Samangani told me: they defeated the most powerful and technologically advanced army in history because of “Allah” and their faith. But the more time I spend in Afghanistan, especially in Kandahar, the clearer it is to me that the Taliban are not to be regarded simply as quasi-medieval fanatics. To Westerners, they might seem like barbarians — particularly in their treatment of women — but they do not reject technology or modernity. Except where they cannot control them, they have absorbed both.

As a result, I’m witnessing a kind of Taliban “March of Progress”. Talibs still patrol the streets with long hair, matted beards, black turbans and the imprint of the village. But what’s also emerging is a discernibly post-American Talib. At the many checkpoints between Kabul and Kandahar, these men now stand guard in matching uniforms, patches identifying them as Afghan National Police. Some wear black balaclavas like Western special forces. They cradle their weapons with conspicuous discipline: fingers straight along the receiver rather than curled around the trigger. They carry M16s and Kalashnikovs, the most famous weapons of the two superpowers defeated in Afghanistan.

One morning, I awake to the sound of a helicopter flying low overhead. “Taliban air force,” explains a friend — who proceeds to tell me a story. When the Taliban swept to power five years ago, the US-trained Afghan pilots were told to fly the helicopters to the safety of Tajikistan. One of them, already in the air, called his father to ask what he should do. The father hurried to the Taliban in their village and laid out his son’s dilemma. “He’s a son of Afghanistan,” they said. “He must come back. He will be safe.” The father relayed the message; his son switched off his transponder, turned the helicopter around mid-air, and flew home. The Taliban kept their word. Now he works as an instructor, teaching Taliban pilots to fly the helicopters the Americans left behind.

The Taliban have embraced many of the technologies and institutions of the Western order they defeated, all the while rejecting its overarching values. They carry American rifles and use Western smartphones, yet remain unyieldingly beholden to Sharia. To them there is no contradiction. Washington assumed that modernization meant, inexorably, Westernization. But the Taliban learned from America without becoming American. And in so doing they exposed the category error on which America’s war was based.

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The US-led coalition claimed to be in the state-building business, but in truth it extended a narrow Western template of statehood to Afghanistan. The West offered Afghans the liberal franchise, confident they would accept it. Why wouldn’t they? This was 2001. Liberal democracy had won the Cold War, helped bring peace to Yugoslavia and presided over a decade of extraordinary capitalist prosperity. Washington went in, convinced that economic development, education, connectivity and institutions would bring democracy in their wake — and turn Kabul into Copenhagen.

I think about this during my visit to the Khirka Sharif: a compound of buildings smothered in stars and polygons, plants and flowers. Lines of Qur’anic calligraphy thread through the patterns. Turquoise, blue and green mingle with ochre, gold and pink. Kandahar’s streets are sludge and concrete, but here, smooth white stone encircles an explosion of geometry, brilliant in the summer sun.

According to local tradition, Khirka Sharif houses the cloak bestowed upon the Prophet Muhammad during his ascension to heaven (the Mi’raj). The cloak played an important role in the early mythology of the Taliban — literally “students” in Pashto — which emerged in Kandahar in the mid-1990s. On 4 April 1996, the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, took the cloak out of its cloth-covered box and carried it onto the roof of Kandahar’s main mosque. There, he held it aloft before thousands of religious scholars, fighters and supporters. The crowd erupted: men threw their turbans into the air in the hope that they might touch the sacred garment, while some reportedly fainted. The assembled ulema (Islamic scholars) acclaimed Omar Amir al-Mu’minin — “Commander of the Faithful” — and pledged allegiance to him. By associating himself publicly with both the Prophet and Ahmad Shah Durrani, the founder of the Afghan state who had brought the cloak to Kandahar, Omar sanctified his leadership and transformed a sacred relic into a source of political authority.

A few months later, on 27 September, Taliban forces captured Kabul and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. It lasted until 2001, when the Americans arrived with historically unprecedented military power and the apparatus of state-building: NGOs and aid agencies, elections and constitutions, Excel spreadsheets, risk assessments and results frameworks. These were the iconography of a different faith, one that rooted its legitimacy in the post-World War II liberal order.

The Taliban’s victory laid bare the error and the arrogance of that project. Modernization and Westernization are not the same thing. A fiber-optic cable is neither autocratic nor liberal. A regime can want modern roads and Western investment while oppressing women and killing homosexuals. After two weeks of reporting in Afghanistan, observing how that what is left of the American occupation has been almost completely appropriated by the Taliban; the attempt to force regime change through military means was always doomed. Today, the West pays lip service to this lesson — but the instinct, judging by Donald Trump’s attempts to topple the Islamist regime in Tehran, remains.

Just before I leave the city, I stop for lunch. I’m sitting cross-legged on the carpet, eating meat and rice, when a Talib in his early twenties comes in and sits down next to me, fascinated by the presence of foreigners. We talk. He joined the Taliban at 12 and fought the Americans and British for years. He likes my Western sunglasses and, ignoring the prohibition on photography, eagerly poses for pictures wearing a pair borrowed from my photographer. Photos and transatlantic fashion clearly delight him. What, I ask him, are his hopes for the future of Afghanistan?

“Taliban,” he says without hesitation, and smiles beatifically.

I journey back, and just under 100 miles south of Kabul, I pass through the city of Ghazni, its entrance dominated by three light-blue domes. Its open-air military museum displays rows of burned-out Soviet tanks, monuments to the Afghan mujahideen’s victory in the 1979–1989 Soviet–Afghan War. A thousand years earlier, Ghazni was the imperial capital of Mahmud of Ghazni, later celebrated as the “idol-breaker” (but-shikan) after his destruction of the Hindu temple at Somnath. When Mullah Omar destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001, he invoked Mahmud, casting himself as a modern-day but-shikan.

The occupying Westerners lacked this sense of history. Shortly after the disastrous 2021 withdrawal, I asked a British soldier who had served in Afghanistan how, after twenty years of war, we had understood the country so poorly. “The thing is,” he told me, “we served one-year tours and left. We weren’t there for twenty years but twenty lots of one.” Western soldiers, diplomats and officials rotated through the war, but the Taliban lived it year after year. And their sense of time and place stretched back centuries — to the cloak of the Prophet and the legend of Mahmud. There was only ever going to be one winner.

An inconclusive failure, then.

Yet instead of asking why America’s war in Iran has been a failure, the better question is: why would anyone expect any major American war, anywhere in the world, to be a success? Far from being an isolated instance that can be blamed on Trump’s incompetence, this war is only the latest in a series of American expeditions that drag on for years, only to backfire and empower US enemies. From Korea to Iran, the story of American military policy since World War II has been one blunder after another, in which tactical achievements are followed by strategic defeat.

It is popular to blame the American president’s bad decisions or personal traits for such fiascos, but the history of major American strategic failures since 1945 can’t be explained solely or even primarily based on the performance of leaders from Truman to Trump. The underlying cause of America’s strategic tragedy — its chain of short-term tactical successes followed by strategic failures — is what experts describe as the American Way of War — a failing style that future American leaders must seek to reform. 

Like President Barack Obama before him, Trump was elected in part because he was viewed as an alternative to the hawks who brought about the “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq. And just as Obama proceeded to launch new American military campaigns in Libya and Syria, so Trump in his second term has brought about the war in Iran, with immediate consequences for the global economy, caused by rising prices for oil, that are far more consequential than were the global consequences of the Korean, Vietnam, and Afghan wars in the eras in which they were fought.

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But the pattern isn’t all that different from those earlier adventures. The Korean War, which caught the United States by surprise, began with Communist North Korea’s invasion of the Western-aligned South on June 25, 1950, influenced by an American blunder: Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s exclusion of South Korea from America’s defense perimeter in Asia, in an unwise speech on Jan. 12, 1950. 

Stalin was quick to take advantage of the invasion, urging Mao’s Communist regime, which had seized power in China a year earlier, to enter the war. The result was a bloody stalemate that Stalin, the sponsor and supplier of North Korea and China, kept going in order to drain American resources. At the same time, Stalin orchestrated the parallel war of Soviet-backed Vietnamese Communists against American-backed France in Indochina. Only after Stalin died, on March 3, 1953, did his successors in Moscow negotiate the partition of Korea and Vietnam with the United States and its allies in 1954. At the cost of more than 36,000 American fatalities and more than a million Korean lives, Washington was only able to restore the former division between the two Koreas at the 38th parallel.  

The tense, armed truce in Korea has persisted to this day. In Vietnam, the North Vietnamese Communist regime and its South Vietnamese insurgent allies, backed by the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, fought to establish a united Vietnam and succeeded in 1975, after a failed Americanization of the conflict that took the lives of more than 58,000 Americans dead, as well as those of some 2 million to 3 million Vietnamese, plus more in Cambodia and Laos. The great-power victor of the Vietnam War was the Soviet Union, which for the remainder of the Cold War turned Vietnam into its largest military base outside of Eastern Europe. 

The all-out invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the United States, following the earlier, limited Gulf War of 1991, similarly resulted in an “own goal” for Washington. Undertaken along with the war in Afghanistan, in the aftermath of 9/11, the US invasion caused Iraq to disintegrate along ethnic and sectarian lines into anarchy, in which al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other Islamist organizations flourished. Instead of bringing to power a pro-American democracy that would permit permanent bases on Iraqi soil, the war replaced Saddam’s secular Baathist regime with a satrapy of Shiite Iran. Last January, Iraq declared that the withdrawal of US forces from its territory was complete.

Obama, elected in part on the basis of his opposition to George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War, then led America into new military quagmires in Libya and Syria. In 2011, NATO, led by the United States, deposed Libya’s dictator Muammar Qaddafi. The result has been continuing fragmentation and anarchy in Libya. In Syria, beginning in 2014, Washington perversely waged a low-level war simultaneously against both sides in a civil war — Islamist militants, on the one hand, and the government of dictator Bashar al-Assad, on the other. Once again, the American strategy backfired. At the end of 2024, Assad and his family fled to Russia. Syria’s president today is Ahmed al-Sharaa, an al-Qaeda warlord whom the US until 2025 had named on its Specially Designated Global Terrorist List.  

This brings us to the war in Afghanistan (2001-2021), the longest war in American history. The purpose of the war was to topple the Taliban, the Islamist faction that had provided a safe haven for Osama bin Laden and his allies before the 9/11 attacks. The result? Following years of warfare under the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, the Biden administration beat a chaotic retreat in August 2021. The victor is the Taliban, which came to power and has imposed a repressive Islamist regime, stripping women, ethnic minorities, and dissidents of rights and carrying out public floggings and executions for crimes including  “illicit relationships.” 

What is striking is the frequency with which major American wars have ended by bringing US enemies to power or allowing them to remain in power. Today, following the deaths of more than 80,000 American soldiers, and millions of Koreans and Indochinese, North Korean Communists aligned with Beijing and Moscow rule North Korea, while Vietnamese Communists rule united Vietnam. Syria and Afghanistan are governed by former anti-American jihadists.

In the case of Korea, it can be argued that the 72-year truce was a partial success that has allowed South Korea to develop and flourish. Even so, North Korea has nuclear weapons with which it threatens America and its East Asian allies, has deployed thousands of troops to fight in Putin’s war in Ukraine, and continues to tie down American military forces in Asia. 

To these humiliating American strategic failures, the Ukraine war might soon be added. In 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden declared, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Today, Putin is still in power and Biden is out of power. The Ukraine War, which has been prolonged as a result of Western military and economic support for Kiev, is likely to end at some point in Russian control of both Crimea and much of eastern Ukraine — yet another embarrassing and costly strategic defeat for the Uncle Sam.

“But other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” Compared to the strategic defeats of US foreign policy in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya, US strategic victories in the last seven decades have been few and far between. The most significant strategic victory came with the success of the US strategy, shared with post-Maoist China, in arming insurgents to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan in 1989 — a policy that did not require the commitment of any American troops. The United States and its NATO allies, with minimal coalition losses, and together with Russia, also helped to bring an end to the wars of the Yugoslav Secession by 1995. Otherwise, the few US strategic victories in recent decades have involved small-scale interventions, both peaceful and violent, in America’s western hemisphere sphere of influence — Panama (1989), Haiti (1994), Venezuela (2026).

All of this can be attributed to the American Way of War, which is shaped by the goal of achieving maximum military objectives with minimum American fatalities, due to the US public’s aversion to significant losses, not only of draftees but also of professional American soldiers in combat. To minimize American losses, the United States has long relied on technology, hoping that air power and conventional big-unit warfare will break the will of enemy regimes.

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During the Korean War, the United States dropped more bombs on the Korean peninsula than were dropped in America’s entire Pacific campaign during World War II. In Vietnam, instead of engaging in a classic, low-level counterinsurgency campaign, Uncle Sam relied on bombing and air-support by helicopters against insurgents and North Vietnamese infiltrators in South Vietnam, and deployed defoliants and herbicides like Agent Orange to destroy South Vietnamese forests and crops. In Afghanistan, the United States sought to minimize the loss of pilots by using expensive drones. In all of these cases, America’s advantages in high-tech industrialized warfare failed to prevent strategic stalemate (Korea) or total defeat (Vietnam, Afghanistan). Given these historic precedents, it comes as no surprise that America’s initial tactical successes in the war against Iran, including the massacre of Iran’s top leaders and the degrading of much of its military capacity, have failed to dislodge the repressive Islamist regime or end the conflict.

The unsuccessful American Way of War is not merely technological, but also political — a category that includes both domestic US politics and geopolitics.

In domestic politics, when a president launches what is hoped to be a brief, successful war, there is often a “rally-around-the-flag” effect (though this has been missing in the case of the US-Israel war against Iran). If there are American casualties, however, over time the rising number of body bags and the perception that no end to the conflict is in sight lead the American public to turn against the war, to the point that most Americans come to prefer abandoning the effort and “bugging out” to further losses in blood and treasure.

But even after the public has turned against a war, domestic political factors can result in its prolongation for years — or, in the case of Afghanistan, for decades — through multiple presidencies. On the one hand, wartime presidents are mindful of rising public opposition to a doomed war. At the same time, they fear that they or their party will be accused of weakness and defeatism by hawks in both parties and will suffer electoral setbacks. So in order to avoid blame, presidents from Johnson to Bush, including Trump in his first term, have flinched from withdrawing from a quagmire and passed the disaster to a successor in the White House who can serve as the scapegoat for American military defeat.

American domestic politics, then, makes it politically easy to start wars and hard to end them.

At the geopolitical level, American leaders’ lack of commitment provides an advantage for US enemies. What is a vital interest for the enemy — the survival of the North Korean regime, the conquest of all of Vietnam by Communists, the survival and if possible the triumph of the Taliban — is only a lesser interest for Washington. In the case of enemy dictatorships, the existential threat is personal. A lost war may mean execution, imprisonment, or exile for dictators and their allies and families.

To be sure, America’s war leaders pretend that the United States, like its enemies, has vital interests in the foreign war, often invoking memories of the Nazis and World War II or warning of “domino effects” throughout a region or nuclear mushroom clouds rising above American cities. But this has proved insincere: Washington has refused to mobilize the country for all-out war, eschewing means such as regimentation of the economy and a wartime draft, suggesting that the threats haven’t been existential, after all. 

The underlying problem, then, is the American Way of War itself, with respect to both military means and strategic ends. Since World War II, there has been a mismatch between America’s reliance on high-tech, air-power-intensive, big-unit warfare and the actual requirements for success in many low-intensity conflicts, as well as a mismatch between American public opinion and the trigger-happiness of much of America’s bipartisan political elite.  

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The American people and American politicians alike prefer a war like World War II, which for the United States lasted only four years and ended with total victory and regime change in the enemy countries. At the same time, the US Army would prefer to fight Field Marshall Rommel in North Africa, with few collateral civilian casualties, and the US Navy would prefer naval battles far from centers of population. What Americans want is a limited war in which a complete victory against demonized or genuinely demonic enemies is possible. When that cannot be achieved, war is unpopular with American civilians and soldiers alike. There is no appetite for brutal, protracted, low-level counterinsurgency campaigns in foreign mountains or jungles, where enemy soldiers and civilians are intermingled. 

It’s unlikely  that Americans will ever support the transformation of the US military into a permanent colonial-style constabulary specialized in assisting proxies and fighting or assisting insurgencies in broken countries around the world. In light of this, the only way to avoid repeated strategic failures is for there to be much higher domestic political obstacles to American presidents’ tendency to resort to war. 

But Congress lost control of the process for launching war to the executive branch in the Truman years; there has not been a formal declaration of war by the United States since 1942, when Congress declared war against Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, having earlier declared war against Japan, Germany, and Italy following the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. The launching of new and failed wars like those in Libya, Syria, and Iran by presidents like Obama and Trump after they campaigned as relative doves proves that it is still too easy for American presidents to drag America into war and still too hard for presidents to get out.  

Breaking this sad pattern of repeated, large-scale American strategic and military failure will require Washington to align its foreign policy with the values of most Americans, not simply replacing one dove-turned-hawk with another in the White House.

Monday’s summit earned Trump praise even from usually critical mainstream outlets. “It was the best day Ukraine has had in a very long time… President Donald Trump offered tantalizing glimpses of how he could approach presidential greatness by saving Ukraine, securing Europe and genuinely deserving the Nobel Peace Prize,” CNN enthused. Yet the meeting would not have occurred had it not been for Trump’s summit with Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, just two days earlier — which instead drew near unanimous criticism from Ukraine supporters for “legitimizing” Putin. But this carefully staged “de-demonization” of Putin injected a much-needed dose of realism and pragmatism into the discussion.

The Alaska meeting formally reestablished direct dialogue between the world’s two largest military and nuclear powers. It marked the first face-to-face meeting between a US and Russian president since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, and the first such encounter on American soil in nearly two decades. It also marked a turning point in US-Russia relations which, since 2022, had reached levels of hostility not seen since the Cold War.

The symbolism was carefully staged: from the red-carpet reception and the ceremonial ride in the American presidential limousine to Trump’s informal reference to “Vladimir”. It was all intended to signal a new chapter in US-Russia relations. But for Moscow, it meant even more. The summit was a political victory. The sight of Trump hosting Putin exposed the failure of the Western strategy of “isolating Russia” and “crippling its economy”. Far from being marginalized, Russia has emerged stronger: it has deepened its strategic relationship with China, expanded its influence among Global South states, and weathered the sanctions regime that was supposed to destroy its economy. Simply by shaking Putin’s hand, Trump acknowledged that Russia remains a power to be reckoned with, not a pariah state.

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More importantly, the summit amounted to an indirect acknowledgment that the West has effectively lost this war. Ukrainian forces cannot retake the territories annexed by Russia. On the contrary, Moscow continues to make incremental advances on the battlefield. This reality makes a negotiated settlement the only possible exit from the conflict — one that would necessarily involve territorial concessions: Crimea, plus the four annexed eastern and southern oblasts.

This perhaps explains why Trump quietly backtracked on the various threats he has leveraged at Russia over the past weeks. In July, he announced a 50-day deadline for Russia to halt the war or face “severe economic consequences”. Putin ignored it. Trump shortened the deadline to 12 days. Putin did not respond. Even on the eve of the Alaskan summit, Trump was still insisting on a ceasefire as a minimum outcome. Yet Putin had been clear: Russia has no interest in a ceasefire that would allow Ukraine to rearm and bolster its defenses with Western support.

Moreover, Moscow’s demands have always extended well beyond the question of territorial recognition, seeking a comprehensive settlement that addresses the “primary roots of the conflict”, as he repeated in Anchorage: that Ukraine will never join Nato, that the West will not transform it into a de facto military outpost on Russia’s border, and that a broader “balance of security in Europe” be restored. As even the hawkish New York Times recently acknowledged: “The Russian leader’s overarching goal is primarily to secure a peace deal that achieves his geopolitical aims — and not necessarily to conquer a certain amount of territory on the battlefield.”

In an effort to strong-arm Putin, Trump also threatened to impose secondary sanctions on purchasers of Russian oil — including China and India. Yet both countries swiftly dismissed the threat, making it clear such measures would be ineffective. Far from isolating Moscow, the sanctions would only have pushed Beijing and New Delhi even closer to Russia.

After Anchorage, Trump abandoned both of his original positions. He said that a peace deal was preferable to a ceasefire, and that secondary sanctions were off the table. For Putin, this was a major win. For the US, it was an implicit admission that Washington lacks the leverage to impose terms. In Trump’s words, it simply “doesn’t have the cards”. This was a blunt recognition of the diminished military and economic clout of the United States and the collective West.

A comprehensive peace deal, however, remains elusive. No terms were agreed in Alaska, largely because Europe — and Zelensky himself — remain opposed to any settlement on Russian terms. European leaders are so heavily invested in the narrative of “victory” that conceding even part of Russia’s demands would be suicidal. Having spent two years assuring their citizens that Ukraine was winning the war, they cannot suddenly pivot without facing public outrage — especially given the dramatic economic repercussion of the war on European economies.

But the deeper issue is structural: European leaders have come to rely on the specter of a permanent Russian threat to justify their ongoing erosion of democracy — from expanding online censorship to persecuting dissenting voices, and even canceling elections, all under the pretext of combating “Russian interference”. Zelensky, too, has reasons to resist peace. Ending the war would mean lifting martial law in Ukraine, exposing his government to pent-up discontent over corruption, repression and the catastrophic handling of the war. Indeed, a recent poll revealed that Ukrainians themselves increasingly favor negotiations over endless fighting. No wonder the Alaska summit triggered panic in European capitals as well as in Kyiv.

Perhaps this explains why Monday’s discussion carefully sidestepped the most sensitive question — territorial concessions — with Zelensky and the Europeans instead pressing for “Article 5-style” security guarantees for Ukraine, effectively treating Ukraine as a Nato member even if it is not formally one. While Russia has signaled general openness to the concept of Western security guarantees, the devil lies in the details. European leaders demanded legally binding US participation and backing — something neither Moscow nor Washington is likely to provide, given the risk of being drawn into direct confrontation with each other. Even less acceptable to Russia is any arrangement involving a Nato military presence in Ukraine, as floated by Britain and France. It seems European leaders have adopted a strategy of expressing openness to a settlement while ensuring, through their conditions, that no such agreement can realistically materialize.

More fundamentally, though, it’s unlikely that Trump himself is prepared to concede to Putin’s demand for a wholesale reconfiguration of the global security order — one that would reduce Nato’s role, end US supremacy, and acknowledge a multipolar world in which other powers can rise without Western interference. For all his rhetoric about ending “forever wars”, Trump continues to embrace a fundamentally supremacist vision of America’s role in the world — albeit a more pragmatic one than that of the liberal-imperialist establishment. His administration continues to support Nato rearmament and even the redeployment of US nuclear weapons along multiple fronts, from the UK to the Pacific. Trump’s policies toward China, Iran and the broader Middle East confirm that Washington still sees itself as an empire whose global dominance must be preserved at all costs — not only through economic pressure, but also through military confrontation when deemed necessary.

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Within this framework, Russia remains a central challenge. As a pivotal ally of both China and Iran, it is embedded in the architecture of the emerging multipolar order that threatens US hegemony. For Washington, Moscow is not simply a regional actor but a key node in a broader strategic realignment.

Trump, however, appears willing — at least temporarily — to put the “Russia problem” on hold, focusing instead on the larger confrontation with China. But this indicates a shift in priorities rather than principles: the logic of American supremacy ensures that Russia will remain on the list of adversaries, even if the spotlight briefly shifts elsewhere.

In this sense, Trump would probably be content with a scenario in which the US extricates itself from the Ukrainian debacle while leaving Europe to shoulder the burden a while longer — possibly until conditions on the ground deteriorate so severely that a settlement on Russian terms becomes unavoidable. Indeed, JD Vance and Pete Hegseth said as much, arguing that the US will stop funding the war, but Europe can continue if it wishes — buying American weapons in the process. This “division of labor” would allow Washington to reallocate resources to the coming confrontation with China, while leaving Europeans stuck in an unwinnable war.

The Russians are well aware of all this. They likely harbor no illusions about the real objectives of the US imperial establishment. And they know full well that any deal struck with Trump could be overturned at any moment. However, Putin’s short-term goals align with Trump’s. one could say that Russia and the United States are strategic adversaries whose leaders nonetheless share a tactical interest in cooperation.

Seen in this light, one might postulate that the purpose of the Alaska summit was never to secure a final peace agreement. Both Trump and Putin doubtless understand that such a deal is currently impossible. Rather, the meeting was about allowing the US to step back from Ukraine without admitting defeat, while Russia continues to advance. For Washington, this creates political cover: Trump can claim he tried diplomacy, while offloading the burden of war onto Europe. For Moscow, the advantage lies in Ukraine’s gradual weakening as US logistical support fades. Indeed, in order to encourage an American exit, Russia might even agree to a temporary ceasefire and possibly also to vague US “security guarantees” — with Russia and the US presenting these as significant concessions and victories, respectively — though such a truce is unlikely to hold.

The most likely outcome will be a temporary thaw in US-Russia relations, though the broader geopolitical struggle will go on. And the real losers will be Ukraine and Europe. Ukrainians will continue dying in a war they cannot win, while Europeans will continue to foot the bill. Eventually, they too will be forced to accept a deal on Russian terms — but only after further suffering. Even then, Europe will remain trapped in a hostile and militarized relationship with Russia, with the potential for renewed conflict at any time. At best, the Alaska summit and its aftermath signals a temporary relaxation in an ongoing confrontation between the West and the emerging multipolar order. At worst, it ensures that Europe and Ukraine continue to pay the price for a war that the US has already chosen to leave behind.

Whether we like it or not — and I certainly don’t — the Taliban now preside over a country devastated by decades of conflict: its new government cannot rely on the structures in place, which have been crippled by the abrupt departure of so many educated and trained managers and professionals.

Public safety, always hazardous in the tumultuous days after a major transition, needs intense policing and patrolling. Isis remains a huge threat, while the new regime’s young Taliban foot soldiers — born in remote villages, raised on nothing but combat and now amazed to find themselves in the shining metropolis of Kabul — have to be closely monitored.

Meanwhile, the disruption to trade is causing massive inflation and price increases for basic goods. A long drought has led to a poor harvest. Covid is still rampant. Winter is coming and the poor — 72% of the population, according to the UN — will look to the Government to provide them with firewood and food.

But good news: Afghanistan has money! The country has $9 billion in financial assets, of which $7 billion are in US banks and $2 billion are deposited in Europe. This is because Afghan banks traditionally keep the bulk of their funds in foreign financial institutions, drawing on them monthly for ongoing liquidity. Then there is the aid money already set aside for Afghanistan. The World Bank administers a Trust Fund for Afghanistan Reconstruction, which was supposed to pay $800 million this year, while the IMF has around $400 million designated for Afghanistan.

There’s just one problem: on the orders of the US government, all this cash has been frozen.

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And that’s not all. So much money has been ferried out of the country in recent years by corrupt officials that there is now a cash shortage. People can only withdraw a small portion of their savings. The country can’t print new bills to replace what was stolen, because the country’s currency is printed by a European company that also falls under US sanctions. It’s economic strangulation.

America likes to give names to its overseas efforts. The Afghan venture was called Operation Enduring Freedom until 2015, and Freedom’s Sentinel thereafter. What shall we call this new phase? Operation Enduring Anger, perhaps. That, after all, is what US military officers, and many in the policy community, are: very angry. It’s a blow for a superpower to have to acknowledge that it could not gain mastery over 90,000 unshaved, minimally equipped fighters, and wasted $2 trillion dollars in the process. It’s embarrassing.

But we should save our empathy for the Afghan people. Their country has been in unrelenting continuous war for more than 40 years. With 70% of its population under the age of 25, most people alive in Afghanistan have never experienced peace. We may not like their new government. But their last leaders were awful in a different way: more educated, yes, and savvier — but they used those attributes to pad their bank accounts in the UAE.

The Taliban government prior to that made women wear burqas and beat men if their beard was too short and executed adulterers in the sports stadium. Before that was a civil war and before that a proxy superpower conflict between the Soviet Union and the US. If the Taliban refrain from their previous behaviour – which so far they have largely been careful to do – and if they honour their promises to reopen girls schools, clamp down on terrorism and not persecute their former enemies, they could turn out to be Best in Show.

Granted, the return of the Taliban is not the solution the US had hoped for: to create a beautiful, free and democratic Afghanistan that would be rich on the basis of its mineral wealth. Yet that project stalled. The Taliban reappeared, won recruits, took territory, inch by inch, year by year. Until 2021, when, at long last, the US faced the facts. They pulled out their military and their diplomats and their contractors, closed the embassy and departed, taking with them nearly 200,000 local staff and supporters and accidental stowaways in a sloppy and casualty-riddled evacuation.

For punctuation, they launched one last faulty drone strike that killed three completely uninvolved non-combatant adults and seven children. The US Inspector General investigated the “incident” and described it as an “honest mistake”. The Costs of War Project estimates a total of 71,000 civilian casualties from direct military action during our little interlude. That’s a lot of mistakes.

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But now that we’re out, and winter has arrived, Afghanistan is braced for things to get worse. Last week, David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Program, told the BBC’s John Simpson that the situation “is as bad as you possibly can imagine: 95% of the people don’t have enough food, and now we’re looking at 23m people marching towards starvation. The next six months are going to be catastrophic. It is going to be hell on Earth.”

For his part, Simpson, a veteran reporter who has reported from 120 countries and 30 war zones, broke down on BBC Radio 4’s Today program as he described the plight of an Afghan mother-of-seven facing famine. “I came across a woman whose name is Fatima and she’s a widow. She’s got seven kids – five girls and two boys – and they’re grindingly poor already,” he said. “She used to make money by weeding the area for a local farmer. He can’t pay her now because he’s not able to grow the crop that he was growing. She’s got no money – she’s having to beg for fuel to make a fire and beg for flour which used to be delivered under the old government before the Taliban came in.”

Widows. Little girls. Hell on earth. Afghanistan is clearly in trouble. But let’s step back for just one moment. This woman used to work for a farmer, who used to farm, but now she doesn’t because he can’t — and it’s not because the Taliban “ascended” to power. It’s because we are sitting on their country’s money and won’t let go. It’s because we, in our determination to starve the Taliban, are starving this widow and her seven children. And 40 million others like them. Operation Mind-blowing Hypocrisy.

Now we think we have the solution: sure, we just left, but now we’re going right back in. To prevent the looming humanitarian crisis. That we made.

So money can now go into Afghanistan — as long as it is administered and dispensed by international organisations, companies and agencies. That means international staff with their Western salaries and entourage of drivers and guards and fixers and translators. That means rented houses and offices surrounded by hired security, and fleets of armoured cars and international conferences that add up to an overhead that consumes 60% or more of the total funds.

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And this will never end, because humanitarian aid does not relate to economic development. Afghanistan, in effect, is being positioned as a permanent welfare state. Perhaps, then, this is not about hungry Afghan children after all. Perhaps this about us — our contractors and the huge aid and development machinery that thrived in the country and now sees a way back in.

But we have to let go. We left. That was our decision. Now let’s leave them in peace. Give them their money. It’s all very well to tell them we won’t trade with them, and their government won’t be recognised, if they violate international law and prevailing international standards of human and women’s rights. And yes, it is regrettable that there are no women in their cabinet. But the same is true in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Brunei, Papua New Guinea, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Vietnam and Yemen. No one is freezing their assets, and they are all comfortably seated in the UN.

For Afghanistan to prosper, we need to stop telling them what to do and how to do it. They are not on our continent or in our cultural sphere. They have not gone through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Revolutions, or any of the other transformative steps that made the modern West. But they shouldn’t be punished for that. As we did, they too must find their path. And, in the meantime, we shouldn’t put boulders in their way.

It is difficult to square this perception with the Army’s shambolic and wasteful recent record in procurement. And yet a sense lingers, whether true or not, that the armed forces remain a refuge area for a type of stoic effectiveness lost to the rest of the country, an ability to get the job done, without complaint, against intimidating odds.

This may say as much about Britain as a whole as it does of the armed forces itself. Consider the wave of affectionate sentimentality about the Army, perhaps a working-class analogue of middle-class sentimentality about the NHS, which swept the country in the late 2000s. The popular mood at the time, manifest in the Help for Heroes campaign (est. 2007) and the Sun’s Military Awards (est. 2008), was immediately inflamed by the sense that troops in the field were being put in harm’s way by the Government’s budget cuts, and by dissatisfaction with heckling and burning of poppies  by jihadist sympathisers as troops paraded home from Afghanistan. Then the Army was a potent symbol of a pure, betrayed institution around which the British people could explore its wider anxieties, a metaphor for growing unease with the direction of the British state itself.

Yet even the Army’s most devoted supporter would be forced to admit that the past two decades have not enhanced its reputation. Both the Labour government’s two wars of choice were painful strategic and tactical failures, entered into with little popular enthusiasm and abandoned with little fanfare. In both wars, units and individual soldiers fought bravely on a tactical level, in pursuit of misguided and ultimately fruitless strategic aims. 

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Crisis is the new normal

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It is within this context that two recent books aim to dissect the Army’s failings in Iraq and Afghanistan to make sense of this lacklustre performance. In The Changing of the Guard, Simon Akam, a former gap-year officer, chronicles the Army like a disappointed lover, twisting the knife into the institution’s sorest wounds. In Blood, Metal and Dust, Brigadier Ben Barry, a former director of the British Army Staff, chooses a higher target. Yes, the successes of the small interventions of the Nineties had led military chiefs to rest on their laurels, so that “operational success had become the mother of complacency.” But for Barry, whose book draws from his still-classified official postmortem of the post-9/11 wars, the ultimate cause of failure can be placed at the hands of the Labour politicians managing the war. 

Both retell the bare, painful facts of the Army’s two most recent defeats. In Iraq, the initial capture and occupation of Basra, entered into with soft hats and the self-congratulatory confidence of an Army that believed it led the world in peacekeeping and counterinsurgency, ended in a humiliating negotiated withdrawal of British forces to the edge of the city, where, pinned down by constant bombardment by the Shia militias who now ran the city, they lost all capacity to exert their influence. 

The Americans, distinctly unimpressed at the failure of the British officers, were forced to help Iraqi forces retake the city in 2008’s Charge of the Knights operation, a humiliation for Britain. “This damaged the reputation of British forces with the US and the Iraqis and inflicted major dents in British military self-confidence,” Barry notes. Akam is less stoic, describing it as ”an acute and lasting humiliation to the British Army”, which “will linger and follow the troops halfway around the world to Afghanistan”.

Indeed, to exorcise this ghost Britain’s political and military leaders recklessly volunteered for a campaign in a Helmand landscape of walled farms and thick vegetation which the Soviets had struggled to pacify, even while the Army struggled with Iraq. In Afghanistan, they believed, the Army would regain its reputation, leaving the difficulties of Iraq behind.

They were wrong. Thinly spread out in isolated rural compounds, or “platoon houses”, British troops were besieged by waves of Taliban fighters, and only avoided being overrun through devastating use of air power, which in turn alienated the civilians whose homes it destroyed. Along with a desperate need to avoid casualties, the reliance on short-ranged patrols, magnets for Taliban ambushes and bogged down by IEDs, meant that the Army could never retain tactical dominance in the countryside, let alone gain the strategic initiative.

As in Basra, force protection became the dominant goal and so initiative passed to the local enemy. Attempts to upend the balance of power, through bold but misconceived operations like Operation Panther’s Claw or through grandiose hearts-and-minds schemes like the transporting of a gigantic turbine through Taliban territory to the dam where it would remain unused for years, all failed. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the rich tribute of blood and treasure Britain poured into the dust was entirely in vain.

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Where does the blame lie? Barry lambasts Labour politicians such as Clare Short, whose intransigent refusal to provide the British troops who found themselves suddenly governing Basra, a city of 1.5 million people, with even basic DFID support due to her opposition to the war, did much to incite local anger in the first vital weeks and months of occupation. He takes aim at Gordon Brown, who as Chancellor forced through defence cuts that reduced the Army’s helicopter fleet, and then lied about it as Prime Minister when soldiers died in Helmand as a direct result. 

But he reserves his greatest ire for the architect of Britain’s entry into these needless wars: Tony Blair. Yet as Barry makes clear, military chiefs also failed to impress upon politicians the need to reassess their strategy in light of their failing mission. The plain-speaking and sober appreciation of hard facts for which the Army is renowned were here tragically absent.

For Akam, much of the blame can be laid at the Army itself. He draws an ethnographic portrait of an institution struggling to make sense of a changing world, whose cherished regimental ethos, the wellspring of individual pride and striving for excellence, also reduces it to “an awkwardly organised collection of warring tribes, inadequately co-ordinated and often fighting each other”. Fearful of future cuts, Generals volunteer the Army for the underestimated Helmand mission even as Iraq is failing: “It’s use them or lose them,” Akam quotes General Sir Richard Dannett on the ill-fated decision. Generals tell politicians what they want to hear, instead of the difficult truths that would blight promotion: “the British Army’s determination to ‘crack on’ got the army into a terrible mess.” 

For Akam, the absence of accountability for such failure is corrosive to the Army’s capability. Junior ranks are hauled before the courts for individual war crimes — rightly, he feels — while generals are rewarded for strategic failure with titles and sinecures. Unlike in Israel, where the failure of the 2006 Lebanon War led to a purge of failed senior officers, “no British general was fired or resigned over Iraq and Afghanistan”. The result, for Akam, is institutional rot: “that hypocrisy had trickled down into the institution below them and was souring it.” 

Moreover, Akam asserts, defence think tanks such as RUSI “can seem more like comfy clubs funded partly by arms manufacturers — friendly forces, in the forces’ jargon — than rigorous external overseers”, inhibiting them from guiding the Army through painful reform. 

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The American presence looms large over both books like a Victorian father, whose approval is yearned for, yet who emanates instead only cold disappointment. The tragic irony, as both Akam and Barry note, was that both the Basra and Helmand campaigns were entered into entirely to win Blair cachet in American eyes, yet the result of the Army’s disappointing performance was only American disdain. As Akam notes of his soldier informants on the eve of the Iraq invasion, “many appreciate that the real reason they are here is to maintain British military standing in American eyes”. 

Yet even during the invasion itself, before the humiliating retreat, the winnowing capacity of the British state had already lowered the Army’s reputation in American eyes. Basra, just over the border from Kuwait, was chosen as Britain’s target, in Akam’s telling, because the Army’s recent adoption of just-in-time logistics had left it with insufficient spare parts to travel any further. Lack of armoured vehicles, of body armour, helicopters, even ammunition left the Army scrounging what it could from unimpressed Americans and almost entirely equipping itself through emergency Treasury funds. 

Citing long-ago Malaya and more-recent Northern Ireland (as if that were an unqualified military success) in its favour, the Army deflected its sense of insecurity at its vastly reduced capacity compared to the US with an arrogant and ultimately mistaken belief that population-centric counterinsurgency was its unequalled métier. American officers quoted by Barry rolled their eyes at “‘more British tripe’” as events proved otherwise.

But even the Americans, whose resources were limitless in comparison, ultimately lost both wars. As Barry observes: “The US government’s decision to invade Iraq must stand as the worst military decision of the 21st century. It was a military strategic folly on a level equal to that of Napoleon’s 1812 attack on Russia and Hitler’s 1941 attack on the Soviet Union.” The failure, then, was ultimately a political one, of British politicians blindly following their American patrons into unwinnable wars: the Army’s essential sin was only one of trying to do the best of a bad job, a not ignoble character flaw. 

It is difficult to avoid the painful conclusion that the British Army functions for the Americans as the Gurkhas do for the British Army: a highly motivated, loyal auxiliary force, incapable of prosecuting a campaign on its own, whose colourful traditions still carry the romance of an earlier, more glorious era. 

Today, however, even this limited role is now in doubt: with the Government’s new focus on naval capacity and the much-vaunted Pacific Tilt forming the basis of Britain’s defence vision, the incoming Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radikin, is allegedly poised to oversee a dramatic cut in the Army’s already-dangerously pared-down numbers, cutting infantry ranks by more than one third of its current numbers. 

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The “Best Little Army in the World” may be getting littler, but it is not for the better. As the defence analyst Francis Tusa warns, the result of its decades-long and self-inflicted procurement woes is that it is now more or less “combat incapable against high-end threats”. Two decades of fighting poorly-equipped insurgents has distracted the Army from its primary mission of defending the country against a competent and well-equipped adversary like Russia or China.

Perhaps this is less a disaster than it may at first seem. The danger is not so much the Army’s incapacity as our politicians’ inability to match their ambitions to its resources, or the moral courage of its generals to gently dissuade them. For all that we mock Germany its military weakness, it is not abundantly clear that Britain has gained much for the decade or so of warfare that the Germans managed to avoid. After Blair’s promiscuous use of the Army to assuage his lust for glory, perhaps a period of enforced abstinence might do the institution some good, if it is to re-equip itself for the graver, and unchosen challenges of the coming century. 

The Army’s focus on the new Ranger battalions, tasked with training and directing local partner forces, in place of line infantry hints at a world of conflict where the business of fighting is increasingly left to expendable proxies. Yet a shrunken, more tightly-focussed Army also presents a challenge for a denuded British state, which has increasingly come to rely on soldiers to make up for its own lost capacity.

Its willingness to take on tasks outside its core role may fend off cutbacks, for a time, but is not necessarily in its own or the state’s best interests; it distracts from its urgent task of modernisation and reorganisation, and gives British governments cover to further winnow away state capacity, confident that soldiers will always be there to pick up the slack. 

As the Chilcot Report on Iraq observed, “a ‘can do’ attitude is laudably ingrained in the UK armed forces, a determination to get on with the job, however difficult the circumstances — but this can prevent ground truth from reaching senior ears.” Perhaps the Army’s capacity to win the next war, like the British state’s to weather the next crisis, would be better served by generals finding the courage, when necessary, to tell politicians that some things simply can’t, or shouldn’t be done.

Understand this imperishable fact and it becomes clear how the country fell so quickly to the Taliban over recent weeks.

The Afghan poppy has been an economic and political force for almost 150 years. As James Tharin Bradford explains in Poppies, Politics, and Power, its modern state was built in the late 1800s “in the shadow of poppy production”. But the emergence of the international drug control regime in the early 20^th century saw opium production banned. Afghanistan could no longer legally sell drugs, and as a result it lost a major source of state income as well as control over many of its rural areas, which relied on opium to survive and just carried on producing it regardless of the prohibition that Kabul was now obliged to enforce. For the first time the poppy came between the peripheries and central authority.

But then in 1979, the Soviets invaded — and opium production spiralled. The mujahedin that resisted Moscow needed cash to fight, and their make-up and available options meant they relied on two things: the rural economy and the global drug trade. Drug production may have remained illegal until 1992, but that didn’t stop Afghanistan becoming one of the most valuable opium suppliers in the world during the 1990s.

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Indeed, by 1999 the country produced 79% of the world’s illicit opium. Even when, a year later, the Taliban banned its production, it still accounted for 70%. Today, it remains the country’s most valuable cash crop worth $863 million, and the “industry” is the largest national employer with more than 500,000 people in the equivalent of full-time work.

Now that the Taliban are back, there are fears that Afghanistan’s drug production — which now also includes marijuana and increasingly methamphetamine — will explode. People are worried. “Taliban mulls flooding the West with heroin to shore up Afghan economy,” according to The Telegraph. What next?

It is important to understand what the Taliban is not: it is not a drug cartel and Afghanistan was never the narco-insurgency or state of popular imagination. The group’s views on opium are almost as variegated as the Talibs themselves. Some will tell you that Opium is haram, forbidden. The Taliban banned its production in 2000 on the grounds that it was not Islamic (though political motives were probably more important). But Islam can be flexible, if necessary. Even its most ardent commandants have a surprising amount of wiggle room; for example, if you’re starving, you can even permissibly consume the “donkey you cannot eat” (the pig).

Similarly for the Taliban, matters of religion — though never the fundamentals — can be shaped according to the economic and political realities on the ground. It is this ability that informs how they deal with opium, and, therefore, what is likely to come to Afghanistan, its neighbours and perhaps the West. It also explains how the group took control so quickly and what will characterise their rule if they are to hold on.

In Afghanistan, power does not automatically stem from the state — it is negotiated and bargained for. The nature of these negotiations is complex because they differ depending on the social, geographical and economic terrain of Afghanistan, which is incredibly varied. To rule there you must manage this problem by negotiating effectively. While former President Ashraf Ghani sat in Kabul trying to nation-build by spreadsheet and hanging out on Google Meets, the Talibs were out in the villages talking to who mattered and ladling out cash. It is this that enabled them to charge through Afghanistan without much resistance. They didn’t really defeat the Afghan army; they just made lots of deals.

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The mountains and rural areas — especially in the poppy-growing southwest of the country — are the constituencies that anyone who wants to govern must get on-side. It is not an easy task. As David Mansfield, an international expert on opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan and the author of A State Built on Sand, points out: these are tough people who will resist the interference of outsiders — including those in government in Kabul. “They do not like being told what to do,” he tells me. “Push them too hard and they will react. The Taliban has had to consolidate their position within those rural communities over time — which means respecting their economic interests” — integral to which is the poppy. Given the choice, there is no choice: opium farming is their default setting.

This had egregious consequences for effective central governance over the past 20 years. Take the case of the southern district of Nangarhar. Both Washington and Kabul were obsessed with building the Afghan National Army (ANA) as a means of securing the state and promoting national unity. Salaries were good, recruitment was aggressive. Mansfield explained to me that for every year that poppy production was banned from 2001 to the present day, more sons from the poppy-growing southern districts swelled the ranks of the ANA and the police.

The local Talibs were upset; they hassled people. But they always got the same response: “We have no love for the army or the state. My son will gladly leave the ANA tomorrow, but you will need to pay his salary — it supports our family.” It’s not that the farmers were especially loyal to the Taliban. They just disliked a government that wouldn’t let them farm and had no interest in dialogue or respecting their way of life — which, of course, left the path clear for someone who would do both.

So what did the Taliban do? They couldn’t kill everyone. Once again, they made deals. Sons could come back from the army to visit their towns and villages — but not in uniform and only at night. And, yes, ok: the villagers could grow poppies once again to earn money that way instead. This is what has been happening all these years. Negotiations and compromises like these — in a variety of forms — took place across the country and is just one reason why the ANA collapsed so quickly, and why the provinces did not resist the Taliban.

Now they are back in power. It seems unlikely the Taliban will risk alienating an important community based around an industry that some of their commanders have healthy financial interests in to boot. And even if the Talibs wanted to ban opium production they know it would not work. “Theoretically they can prohibit it, but that doesn’t mean they can control it,” says Mansfield. Then there are the political considerations: start your reign by giving orders that people ignore and watch the veneer of power crumble.

But what about after they have consolidated their hold on things? Once again, it depends. Right now, the price of opium is low. It doesn’t make much economic sense to start wide-scale production in the face of international opposition. Right now, the Taliban is still consolidating its power and — rhetorically at least — seeking relations with as many countries (Israel excepted) as possible. At the very least it makes sense not to alienate everyone immediately. But of course, if the economy collapses, if job in cities disappear and government jobs become fewer, not to mention the end of the multiplier effects of the aid economy as NGOs flee alongside Western powers, then things might look very different.

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And there is something else, too. An ODI report last month found that funding from international donors to Afghanistan’s remote provinces has been small, compared with the trade in legal and illegal goods that happens mostly off-the-books. In the southwestern Nimroz province, for example, money from Kabul amounts to about $20 million annually, whereas informal “taxation” from smuggling and other illegal activities raises about $235 million annually.

Crucially, as the authors note, “after the withdrawal of US and allied troops, money becomes the main instrument available to international partners during negotiations”. Simply put, cash is the only leverage we might have over the Taliban in future. But with so many hidden sources of it circulating, it could turn out to be not very much leverage at all. The Taliban could well prove to be beyond Western influence. If the group decides to sanction opium production once more, who will stop them?

Whatever happens, it will be informed not by international opinion but what the Afghans negotiate — or fail to — among themselves. Whether in the 1800s or the 1990s or the last 20 years of Western occupation, those who control Kabul do not control the periphery. As Mansfield concludes, “those in Kabul have to tread carefully. The provinces may be unruly, but they have their own way of doing things as everyone who has tried to govern over the last 40 years has discovered to their cost.”

Almost 20 years ago, Tony Blair told the Labour Party conference that 90% of the drugs sold on British streets came from Afghanistan. He was looking for an excuse to invade, of course — but Afghan heroin had been a problem for Britain, and the world, for decades. We have reversed into the future. Once again it is not only the Taliban the West must now worry about in Afghanistan, but also the poppy — and the power it wields across the world.

As Biden observed, entirely correctly, “there’s nothing China or Russia would rather have, would want more in this competition than the United States to be bogged down another decade in Afghanistan”. Instead, he asserted, “this decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.” Whatever the howls of outrage from America’s prestige opinion pages, the age of liberal imperialism is over: the time of nakedly realist great power competition has begun.

Yet Biden’s worldview, so outrageous for an American commentariat as recklessly jingoistic as John Bull magazine in its Edwardian prime, is supported by analysis from an unexpected quarter: that of the architect himself of both America’s War on Terror, and of the great slaughter in New York that precipitated it, Osama bin Laden.

Piecing together the themes of bin Laden’s various statements to the outside world in the years immediately before and after 9/11, a specific, concrete plan emerges, by which the “slave of God” — as the billionaire son of a Yemen-born construction magnate styled himself — would accelerate the collapse of the American empire through embroiling it in long, unwinnable and expensive ground wars in the Islamic world. This plan, bin Laden claimed, had formulated itself through his experience of the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, whose ignominious withdrawal from the country had shortly preceded their imperial collapse, events in which he himself had played a relatively undistinguished part.

In an interview conducted a month and a half after 9/11, bin Laden observed that:

“the Soviet Empire has become — with God’s grace — a figment of the imagination. Today, there is no more Soviet Empire; it split into smaller states and only Russia is left… So we believe that the defeat of America is something achievable — with the permission of God — and it is easier for us — with the permission of God — than the defeat of the Soviet Empire previously.”

Why would it be easier, asked the journalist, al Jazeera’s then-star reporter Taysir Alluni incredulously? Because, bin Laden replied, “we have already fought them — like our brothers who have engaged in battle with the Americans, as in Somalia. We have not yet found a significant force of note. There is a great aura about America, which it uses to scare people before it engages in battle.”

But, he claimed, the brief and inglorious American episode in Somalia showed that American power could not stretch to imposing order on insurgent forces far from home: “America left, dragging behind it tails of humiliation, defeat, and loss, without looking back; it retreated unexpectedly, and it forgot all that great media enthusiasm about the New World Order, and how it was the master of that order, and could do whatever it pleased.”

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We need to talk about 9/11

By Lionel Shriver

This was not the first time bin Laden had used the example of Somalia to persuade sceptics of the logic underlying his plan. In his first interview with al-Jazeera three years earlier, after al-Qaeda’s twin bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which had killed more than 200 people, bin Laden noted that:

“We believe that America is much weaker than Russia, and we have learned from our brothers who fought in the jihad in Somalia of the incredible weakness and cowardice of the American soldier. Not even eighty of them had been killed and they fled in total darkness in the middle of the night, unable to see a thing.”

Even before then, in a 1997 interview with CNN journalist Peter Arnett, bin Laden noted that in Somalia, “after a little resistance, the American troops left after achieving nothing. They left after claiming that they were the largest power on earth. They left after some resistance from powerless, poor, unarmed people whose only weapon is the belief in God Almighty, and who do not fear the fabricated American media lies.”

Indeed, he added, claiming dubiously that veterans of the Afghan jihad had fought against the Americans in Somalia, “We learned from those who fought there, that they were surprised to see the low spiritual morale of the American fighters in comparison with the experience they had with the Russian fighters. The Americans ran away from those fighters who fought and killed them, while the latter stayed.”

In choosing Afghanistan as the location for the war with the United States which would, he believed, bring about its decline, bin Laden embroiled the Afghan people in a conflict not of their choosing, doubling the length of their civil war by another twenty years and inflating its butchers’ bill by 46,000 civilian deaths alone. And yet, with the easy confidence of a billionaire, he told Afghans in a video message that their sacrifice was worth it — and that “whoever doubts this should learn from the Russians how the blessed jihad destroyed their myth.” Because, bin Laden claimed, “the struggle is both financial and physical” so that even as the Taliban reeled under American bombing, “it is possible to strike the economic base that is the foundation of the military base, so when their economy is depleted they will be too busy with each other to be able to enslave poor peoples.”

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The theatre of terror

By Simon Cottee

This emphasis on the War on Terror as a giant, entrapping money pit for the American empire runs throughout bin Laden’s messages. In his 2002 Letter to the American People, bin Laden taunted the inhabitants of “the worst civilisation witnessed by the history of mankind” that “it was easy for us to provoke this administration and lure it into perdition. All we had to do was send two mujahidin to the Far East to raise up a rag on which “al-Qaeda” was written, and the generals came running. This inflicted human, financial, and political losses on America without them even achieving anything worth mentioning, apart from providing business for their private corporations.”

Indeed, in his critique of America’s conversion of the War on Terror into a vast and lucrative wealth-creation scheme for the military-industrial complex, bin Laden either echoes or prefigures the identical critiques of American anti-interventionists of both Left and Right, from Bernie Sanders to Trump’s previous, anti-interventionist incarnation.

As bin Laden boasted, the massive borrowing needed to finance the wars “truly shows that al-Qaeda has made gains, but on the other hand it also shows that the Bush administration has likewise profited. Anyone seeing the enormity of the contracts won by dubious large corporations, like Halliburton and others connected to Bush and his administration, can be certain of that. But the reality is that it is you, the American people and your economy, who are losing.” For “we are continuing to make America bleed to the point of bankruptcy, by God’s will,” he asserted.

Yet it was only the presence of America’s then-Republican government, surely a gift from God, which enabled this situation: “the White House leadership, which is so keen to open up war fronts for its various corporations, whether in the field of arms, oil, or construction, has also contributed to these remarkable results for al-Qaeda.” Indeed, he mocked, “to some analysts and diplomats, it seems as if we and the White House are on the same team shooting at the United States’s own goal, despite our different intentions.”

No wonder, then, that Biden has similarly invoked the vast cost of the wars — two trillion dollars in his estimate — in bringing about their end. But even this colossal sum may be an understatement. As Fortune noted recently, this figure does not include the interest payments on the loans taken out to prosecute the war, nor the benefits paid to the survivors of the more than 7,000 American dead. Nor does it include perhaps the greatest single expense: the medical bills for the war’s more than 50,000 wounded veterans, which may alone total $2.3 trillion by 2050.

All told, claims Fortune, citing Brown University’s Costs of War project, the real bill of the War on Terror, including the lesser engagements in Yemen and Syria, may end up closer to eight trillion dollars, the effect of which American taxpayers have not yet faced, as “almost the entire cost of the Afghan and Iraq wars has come from borrowed money, much of which has yet to be repaid”.

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A French lesson for Blair and Bush

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

Among America’s creditors is, of course, China, which made use of the West’s overriding distraction with winning over mountain village chieftains in the wilds of Afghanistan, with trying and failing to install a functioning liberal democracy in Iraq and then with destroying the Islamic State caliphate the invasion spawned to accelerate its rise to global industrial dominance. It is surely no accident that only now that the War on Terror is winding down, competition with China has finally intruded into the American foreign policy consciousness, despite being mocked as eccentric or even racist when expressed by then-presidential candidate Trump as the empire’s overriding challenge.

Even in the new Cold War over infrastructure and state capacity, perhaps the battleground on which wavering nations will be competed for, the money wasted on the failed wars in Asia could, as the Institute of Policy Studies thinktank observes, “have solved multiple problems in the U.S., like erasing all student debt for $1.7 trillion [or] decarbonizing the entire electricity grid for $4.5 trillion.”

But we are where we are. The twenty failed years of war, debt and distraction may not yet have led to America’s collapse in the manner bin Laden eagerly anticipated, but it certainly set the then-sole superpower at a disadvantage in preparing for the coming competition over its right to global hegemony. As Biden noted in his speech announcing the withdrawal, abandoning the Afghan adventure was necessary because “we need to focus on shoring up America’s core strengths to meet the strategic competition with China and other nations that is really going to determine our future.” Returning to this theme in his speech justifying the chaotic scenes in Kabul, he reiterated that “the world is changing. We’re engaged in a serious competition with China… We have to shore up America’s competitiveness to meet these new challenges in the competition for the 21st century,” and “as we turn the page on the foreign policy that has guided our nation the last two decades, we’ve got to learn from our mistakes.”

But can America do so? Their foreign policy establishment certainly seems averse to learning any lessons from two decades of failure, even if ordinary voters overwhelmingly support Biden’s diminution of America’s historical mission. It is not obvious that a GOP establishment responsible for the manifold strategic disasters of the twenty-year war can legitimately criticise Biden’s decision to end it, especially not when its last president rode to power partly on the same platform.

Yet even bin Laden’s purported killer, a SEAL operative-turned conservative talkshow celebrity and anti-masking activist, maintains his brand by asserting that “It baffles me right now that we’re even considering negotiating with the Taliban … Why don’t we just go kill them?” — to the applause of American conservatives who applauded Trump’s anti-interventionism just as passionately when the random spinning wheel of America’s culture war was calibrated to reward different incentives.

For al-Qaeda itself, America’s endless internal political conflict, its deepest malaise, is nothing but a cause for crowing celebration. In a recent propaganda video, America Burns, an adaptation of a previous magazine article, al-Qaeda surveyed the American political scene, crowing at the internal divisions of a “decaying polity” on the “verge of collapse”. In al-Qaeda’s framing, America is teetering on the edge of civil war. Its vast security apparatus has increasingly been directed onto American voters themselves as the combination of crude populism and the reactive collusion between the security state and “the liberal press that controls the American media industry” raised the country’s tensions to boiling point. As a consequence, America’s “usury-based economy” is merely “an inflated balloon ready to implode”, serving only “the corporate robber barons” and “Communist China.” Indeed, they boast, “It was Allah’s wisdom that the fourth plane whose downing was ordered by Dick Cheney on the 11th of September did not reach its target, and Americans were left to destroy the edifice of their democracy with their own hands.”

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How the neocons got away with it

By Razib Khan

So what can be said of America’s standing twenty years after 9/11? Strategically, the hegemon appears a strange oxymoron, a global military empire which cannot win wars. It can kill hundreds of thousands of people and cause untold destruction — generally with the very best and noblest of intentions — but is seemingly unable to deploy the overwhelming military force on which its global position depends in a way that advances its interests. Given its military caste was unable even to manage a bloodless withdrawal from an airfield it controlled under a timetable it itself set, who can bet confidently that they would emerge the victor from a struggle against a competent and prepared near-peer adversary like China?

Only a reckless gambler, or the British government, would be happy with such a high-stakes throw of the dice. Politically, America’s divisions are a cautionary tale rather than an example to the world it still claims to lead; if the US still retains its status as the global standard-bearer for liberal democracy, then liberal democracy is not as enticing a prospect as it once appeared.

Yet America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, like the withdrawal from Iraq — which, after a decent interval to avoid the appearance of being pushed out by the Iranian-backed militias the war empowered, seems certain to follow — does not herald the end of American power. It was the wars themselves that were the trap, as bin Laden made clear time and time again, and their ending is a necessary moment of rebalancing to focus on the far greater challenge ahead. In this, we can say Biden was the president the American empire needed, even if his supporters didn’t realise that was what they were getting: a cautious realist brought to power by a liberal-imperialist establishment, and a broadly competent manager of retrenchment, and objective decline.

It is therefore wrong to claim — as Tom Tugendhat and others have — that the withdrawal from Afghanistan is America’s Suez moment, not least because Suez was a military victory for Britain. It would be more apt to view it as America’s Singapore, a failure of planning and overconfidence which heralded the collapse of imperial power in vast swathes of Asia, yet a moral and psychological defeat more than a terminal strategic one. The Suez moment, if it comes, still lies over the horizon.

The lustre of the American empire has been tarnished, but the core underlying structure may hold good for decades yet; if America has lost its claims to global leadership, it has also lost its desire to press them. In abandoning America’s failing wars to focus on its decaying infrastructure and the great power competition that will now define its future, Biden has, perhaps, twenty years after the carnage of 9/11, finally exorcised bin Laden’s ghost.

“How could we not feel, as in the darkest times in our history, a deep solidarity with the people of the United States, to whom we are so close, and to whom we owe our freedom?” wrote Jean-Marie Colombani, possibly the then-most powerful opinion-maker in France, in that special grandiloquent style the French adopt to signal momentous thought. In the next paragraph, he warned the West not to fall for the “monstrous hypocrisy” of “finding excuses for the perpetrators of this murderous madness, crediting them with the ‘good intentions’… to avenge the wretched of the world against their supposed sole oppressor, America… They do not want a better, fairer world. They simply want to wipe ours off the map.”

Strong words after the shock of 9/11. The last paragraph of this 1250-word tirade did warn, accurately as it turned out, against escalation — “[the terrorists’] attitude is obviously suicidal. By going to the extremes, they want to force Muslim opinions to ‘choose sides’ against ‘the great Satan’ [and] to spread an unprecedented crisis throughout the Arab world. They want to attract the whirlwind. Our leaders must see the danger of causing the nations these warmongers covet to buy into this suicidal logic.”

Le Monde duly supported the French government’s October 2001 decision to join both the US-led military coalition for Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, as well as the NATO international security task force. This, despite France not being bound by NATO’s charter (having been spectacularly pulled out of the Organisation by Charles de Gaulle in 1966), was met by popular support that never rose to jingoism. Both Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist president, and Lionel Jospin, the Socialist PM he’d been forced to take on when his party lost the surprise 1997 General Election, were for once in agreement. France sent 4,000 crack troops. By 2010, the French were the fourth largest contributor to the war in Afghanistan (after the US, UK and Italy).

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The Afghan Resistance has begun

By Benard-Henri Levy

Not only did France carry her weight during the War on Terror; her expertise on Arab and Islamic terrorism was invaluable, acknowledged by both the Americans and the British. French investigative magistrates draw on over half a century’s experience with every variety of bloody attacks: during the Algerian War of Independence in the 1950s-1960s; Left-wing Palestinian in the 1970s; Iranian in the 1980s; Algerian again in the 1990s as France became the hinterland of the 1992-2000 civil war in her former colony. When 9/11 came, only the scope of it was different from what the juges d’instruction had been working on for decades.

The French decision to leave Afghanistan in 2012, was met with relative public indifference, which is a more normal response The Constitution of the Fifth Republic, tailored to Charles de Gaulle’s specific measurements, states (Art. 15) that the President of the Republic is “the head of the armed forces, decides on the use of military force and to this end has the responsibility and the power to engage nuclear forces if necessary”. Essentially, the otherwise-ornery French have left successive presidents to it. Even before Jacques Chirac put an end to conscription in 2002, there were next to no protests when the French military, including conscripts, were deployed in Lebanon, Chad, Kosovo or Bosnia.

The French see their military (and nuclear capacity) as part of a cherished mental dreamland: it’s the last acceptable refuge of the Grandeur invoked from Louis XIV to Le Général. This Grandeur sublimates France from mid-size power to major player, with a seat at the Security Council, an impressive armaments industry for a country of 67 million people, a capacity of foreign deployment roughly similar to the UK’s (currently 17,000 troops from the North Sea to the Pacific, Sub-Saharan Africa, Syria and the Baltics), and the respect of her soldierly peers. From the 19th century, the French Army, whose officers signally refused to back populist leaders like Général Boulanger, has been known as La Grande Muette (The Great Mute): this held during the Algerian Independence war when two generals-led military coups ended in ignominious failure. It’s the civilians, not the military, who, from Danton to the Yellow vests, try to overturn the Republic.

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Marine Le Pen's daddy issues

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

Predictably, perhaps, the post World Trade Center transatlantic love affair soured fast. Dominique de Villepin, Chirac’s grand-standing Foreign Secretary (an obsessive collector of Napoleoniana, he has taken on some of the traits of his hero), came to speak to the UN General Assembly one year after the attacks, on 12 September 2002, and again on 14 February 2003, to urge jaw-jaw and not war. He brushed off any illusion that, after Afghanistan, France would also join the coalition to unseat Saddam Hussein from his quarter century iron rule over Iraq. The French sat out the Iraqi war, earning themselves a variety of soubriquets, the nicest of which, “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”, had been stolen from The Simpsons.

As it turned out, France was right, but for an unholy combination of cleverness and wrong-headedness. The French, who over the years had furnished Saddam with some $5.1 billion’s worth of weapons for his eight-year-war against Iran, not including the making of his fledgling nuclear capacity, also knew that Germany had built the plants that enabled Iraq to manufacture the Sarin and Tabun gas that killed 5,000 Kurds at Halabja. In other words, if anyone knew that Saddam Hussein was in the process of obtaining WMD, they sat in government offices in Paris — none more so than Jacques Chirac, who’d started cultivating the Baath ruler of Iraq since 1974. The French pushback against “Iraqi Freedom”, which would turn out to be an inspired decision, and keep us out of that mess, was more motivated by deep cynicism than by the romantic illusion that deposing a brutal Middle-Eastern dictator would start “a virtuous circle of democracy” in the area. (Prof. Bernard Lewis’s phrase.)

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How France fell for QAnon

By John Lichfield

Like every French president and Foreign secretary since de Gaulle, Chirac and Villepin prided themselves in understanding what they saw as the realities of the Middle East. The Quai d’Orsay, the French Foreign Ministry, has long pushed la politique arabe de la France. This is a mix of heady Gallic Orientalism, cold calculations (all those Mirage and Super-Étendard planes, Exocet missiles, helicopters, air-to-surface guided missiles, and more), power assessment, and entrenched underlying anti-Americanism (which often lumps the British in the Anglo-Saxon package).

It’s also arguable that the practice of French politics (the alliances, the reversals, the treasons, the conviction that idealism is for mugs) is much closer to Near East traditions than to the Jeffersonian (or Burkean) approach. It remains that French scepticism, in this instance, was inspired.

My mother could be fierce and she punished me frequently, but even then I knew that her threat was bluster. She might smack me, but she wasn’t going to take off any digits.

Empty threats are used as leverage to entice certain behaviour. But what if the threats are real? For the girls living under Taliban control in Afghanistan, threats are not theatre: they are promises. Even for transgressions as small as painting their fingernails, they face real consequences.

Saturday marks 20 years since the fall of the World Trade Center, a day that brought unimaginable devastation, heartbreak and loss to America. But if there was one glimmer of hope that came from that tragic moment, it was for the women and girls of Afghanistan. After 9/11, and the conflict that followed, a level of freedom unknown to previous generations came to their country.

I remember watching the planes crash on television. I was at work in the Netherlands at the time, and sat, horrified, with my colleagues. As we watched, we wondered how the world’s superpower would respond to such an evil attack on the American homeland. They certainly had the power, resources and reason to go and obliterate their newfound enemy. Sitting there, we could never have guessed that this tragedy would end up bringing more rights and freedoms to women in Afghanistan.

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How 9/11 created the surveillance state

By Jacob Siegel

The United States could have gone into Afghanistan, taken its revenge and left. President Biden’s continual defence over the past weeks has been that he was following the original plan. “We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on September 11^th, 2001, and make sure al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again.”

But this is not where the legacy of 9/11 ends. It was not all necessary revenge and retaliation. Instead, we offered to help rebuild and provide hope to those who had not had it before. Together with our Afghan allies, we built a more inclusive society for women and girls, in the belief that precisely this kind of modernisation would reduce the danger of a Taliban restoration.

As Adam Tooze explains in his brilliant Substack, from 2003 to 2018, the number of women enrolled in university rose from 7,200 to 49,000. Female life expectancy increased by almost 10 years from 2001-2019. “Whereas in 2000,” Tooze explains, “Afghan men lived longer than women, now Afghanistan has the normal pattern of women outliving their menfolk.” Rates of literacy among females more than doubled between 2000-2018.

A generation of girls was raised without knowing life under Taliban control. And they soared. In 2017, an all-girls robotics team was founded, known as the Afghan Dreamers, who went on to win the Entrepreneurial Challenge at the Robotex festival in Estonia. In 2008, Afghanistan saw its first female mayor, Azra Jafari, in the town of Nili. And she was just the first of many females to hold political positions, including Salima Mazari, Zarifa Ghanfari, and Fawzia Koofi. Women made up 40% of the most recent class of graduates from the American University of Afghanistan. They have their own all-female orchestra. Female entrepreneurs invested $77 million over 18 years, resulting in 77,000 jobs. Their rights were promoted by the 2004 Afghanistan Constitution in Article 44, stating that “the state shall devise and implement effective programs to create and foster balanced education for women”.

Their successes were awe-inspiring. They were also a source of pride for Americans. They were, in part, America’s girls — girls raised to know a certain level of freedom, with their rights secure and protected, thanks to the U.S.-led intervention prompted by 9/11.

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How the neocons got away with it

By Razib Khan

In 2002, the United Nations Development Programme produced the Arab Human Development Report, aimed at providing a path for growth and opportunity in the Arab world. The report concluded that three factors contribute to the constraints of human development in the Arab world: “freedom, empowerment of women, and knowledge”. Individuals needed to be educated beyond religious ideology, their human rights respected and women’s rights expanded. And for the last 20 years, the United States has supported women and these goals through the US Agency for International Development and State Department-funded programmes, as well as encouraging women’s participation in government and the private sector.

But now women’s rights are being ripped away. Biden’s betrayal reverberates sharply across the country. He offered a false dichotomy to the American people: either pull all troops out or go back to fighting an “endless war”. Pulling out the remaining US troops initiated the swift collapse of the Afghan government, will result in Afghanistan returning to a terrorist safe haven and removed the shield protecting women’s rights in the country. Surely this is not the legacy that Americans want to leave behind on the 20^th anniversary of 9/11?

The effects of Taliban control are already being felt by women. The Taliban have announced that women must cover their faces to attend university and genders must segregate, both in class and while entering and exiting the building. They are banned from sports, considered by the Taliban’s cultural commission as “neither appropriate nor necessary” for women. Women can no longer hold ministerial positions. There are no women included in the new administration. Some are being told not to go to work, allegedly a temporary change while the Taliban draw up new “women related procedures”. They face real violence if they disobey. Those speaking out against the Taliban are being deemed “agents of America” and accused of “not being true Muslims”. They are being erased from the public square. And the Taliban haven’t been in control for a full month yet.

What will happen to America’s Afghan girls? The ones born and raised since 2001. The girls inspired by the allure of freedom, liberalism, and chasing their own dreams. Those who have, until now, not known the crushing burdens and barriers of life under the Taliban. What will become of the defiant girls, who speak up for their rights? The ones who question the religious fundamentalism of the Taliban?

Many will suffer severe punishments. Violence will be unleashed against them in a magnitude that those in the West do not comprehend. Body parts will be chopped off. Sexual harassment, rapes, honour violence and murders will become the norm.

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We need to talk about 9/11

By Lionel Shriver

But, unlike before, this time is different. The women of Afghanistan will fight back. They’ve already begun. Protests are erupting across the country. Women of all ages are standing firm against the Taliban. In Kabul, women attempted to march to the presidential palace, “demanding the right to work and to be included in government”. They were attacked for it, with videos and photos revealing the bloody violence they faced at the hands of the Taliban. At a subsequent protest in Kabul, one woman stated: “We don’t care if they beat us or even shoot us. We want to defend our rights. We will continue our protests even if we get killed.”

At another protest in Herat, calling for girls’ education, one of the organisers, Basira Taheri, explained: “The women of this land are informed and educated. We are not afraid, we are united.” Pashtana Durrani, the Executive Director of Learn Afghanistan, a bulwark for Afghan women’s rights, said; “We are going to make sure [girls] get to go to school, they get to go to work. If not on the terms that we want in public, we’re going to make it happen anyways.”

As the saying, often attributed to Thomas Carlyle, goes: “Once the mind has been expanded by a big idea, it will never go back to its original state.” The Taliban cannot undo the last 20 years. These women and girls are refusing to submit to a new Dark Age. That glimmer of hope, sparked after 9/11, has not been extinguished. Even with the Taliban in control, America’s girls aren’t going to give up.

And now the world is watching. Before 9/11, the atrocities committed by the Taliban on the women of Afghanistan received very little coverage in the West. Now, everyone knows names like Malala and Bibi Aisha. And we will come to know more names, like Basira Taheri’s, as we cheer them on. Two decades on, these women may be the most enduring achievement of the American intervention that followed 9/11.

They are defiant. And, as a former defiant girl, I can say with conviction that they can’t beat or cut that defiance out of you.

Except, of course, it doesn’t. We’re not nearly so crackers about animals as we’re supposed to be. In fact, the real delusion is among those who believe that the beastly British have lost their tiny minds.

Take the other zoological saga of the last few days — Pen Farthing and Operation Ark. Did we really leave people behind in Kabul so that a bunch of cats and dogs could be airlifted to safety? If we did, then that would indeed be an outrage.

But as far as we know, what actually happened was rather different. The aircraft was a private charter. The animals were in the hold. And human beings took the seats. That’s a net gain for Homo sapiens.

It does seem that a Special Advisor in Whitehall was spoken to rudely, but Farthing has apologised for that. Meanwhile an “MoD source” has said that any assistance given was not at the expense of the official evacuation effort.

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By William Dalrymple

What intrigues me is the reaction of the commentariat. It’s not the criticism of Operation Ark (or the British Government) that stands out, but a deep unease at what this affair reveals about the British and our moral priorities.

“I don’t like it,” said Charlotte Ivers in the Sunday Times, “I don’t like it at all. And I really don’t like what it says about our country.” For the Spectator, Sam Ashworth-Hayes concluded that “Britain chose the picture of the sad puppy over people fearing for their lives.”

“What a story to tell the world about ourselves,” laments Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian. And even Henry Hill — who is never knowingly under-patriotic — condemned “our weird attitude to animals” on UnHerd.

A new poll from YouGov provides apparent proof. Asked a question about the value of lives, only 49% of those asked said that “human lives are worth more than animal lives”. Meanwhile, 40% said that “human lives are worth the same as animal lives.” 3% said “human lives are worth less than animal lives” and the rest didn’t know.

So there you go: half the country is nuts. How can any self-respecting “voice of reason” stay silent about that?

What’s more, some parts of society are nuttier than others. Among those most likely to say that human and animal lives are worth the same are Leave voters, northerners and blue-collar workers. So for metropolitan types who believe the Brexit British have gone mad, this looks like further confirmation. More generally, this is a great issue on which to signal one’s superior rationality: I am humane; you are sentimental; she is a mad cat lady.

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The media enabled Afghanistan's collapse

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

But opinion polls are not to be taken too literally. Public answers to pollsters’ questions should be interpreted as an opportunity to make a point. So when people say that humans and animals are of equal value, what are they really saying? In all likelihood, most of them are making the point that animal lives matter as well as human lives — but not, in fact, as much.

After all, if people really did believe that “animals are people too” then they’d stop eating them. Or, if already vegetarian, they wouldn’t be so relaxed about other people eating them. I don’t eat meat (for animal welfare reasons), but I’m a lot less upset by my meat-eating friends than I would be if they took up cannibalism.

Here’s another example. In 2001, the Labour government dealt with the foot-and-mouth outbreak by ordering a mass slaughter of livestock. Across the country, millions of dead farm animals were incinerated on flaming pyres. The nation was horrified — and yet in the subsequent general election the politicians responsible were returned to power with a thumping majority.

Now can you imagine the current government using similar tactics to halt spread of Covid? Obviously, it’s unthinkable. And that’s because, whatever people might say in polls, they recognise the vast gulf between man and beast.

But that being the case, how does one explain or justify the existence of animal welfare charities? Why are there so many of them in this country, when so much human need is still unmet?

The first thing to say is that, contrary to popular opinion, charitable giving in this country isn’t dominated by donkey sanctuaries. In fact, less than one donated pound in every ten goes to a charity that primarily benefits animals.

Nevertheless, there are those who resent the very existence of charitable juggernauts like the RSPCA. It was founded in 1824 as the plain old Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals — the first animal welfare charity anywhere in the world. In 1840 it added the R to its initials after Queen Victoria became a patron.

But this is a long running bone of contention. Why is the RSPCA “Royal” and the NSPCC merely “National”? Doesn’t this show that the British accord a higher value to preventing cruelty to animals than to children? It’s a fatuous comparison, of course — an accident of history that says nothing about the overall allocation of money and status in our society.

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How Tony Blair gets away with it

By Peter Franklin

Still the essential problem remains. Why should animals get any help at all, when people need it too?

The reason why the Operation Ark story made such an impact is that — as perceived by the critics — it symbolised this moral dilemma. Spaces on a plane are limited, but so are other resources — from money given by donors to time given by volunteers. Shouldn’t it all be allocated according to rational priorities?

Then again, why limit this question to charitable work? It surely also applies to spending on pets — which currently runs at £8 billion a year in the UK. In fact, never mind the animals, there’s a hierarchy of need among human beings too. Does your child really need that new bicycle when the money could go to Afghan children? Or what about the fripperies you buy for yourself — couldn’t those resources be better allocated?

If Pen Farthing didn’t exist, then, for the sake of our troubled consciences, it would be necessary to invent him. Indeed the entire charitable sector provides a convenient distraction from the spending decisions we make in our own lives.

We’re losing sight of the true meaning of charity, which transcends the merely rational. The concept of “effective altruism” — that is, methodically working out where philanthropic resources can be most productively allocated — has its place; but we need to remember that compassion is also about the relationship between the helper and the helped. The word literally means “to suffer with”.

A compassionate act is, therefore, good in and of itself. It cannot be dispassionately judged on the basis of outcome alone — still less as a comparison of theoretical outcomes.

Compassion brings the strong down to the level of the weak, the rich to the poor, the healthy to the sick, the happy to the sad. And because it does so without coercion, it is profoundly humanising, even when the recipient is an animal.

When Antony Blinken was selected as Secretary of State, Foreign Policy magazine hailed it as a “return to normalcy for weary diplomats”. Finally, when President Biden was elected, the New York Times raved that it represented an end to “four tumultuous years under Trump”;  the Los Angeles Times’s editorial board welcomed his election as a victory “for the American people”.

Biden, Blinken and Sullivan — three men who, less than a year ago, were cheered on as the sensible, cool-headed triumvirate capable of saving the West. Today that promise has been sullied. Instead, they will be remembered as three of the key figures responsible for the tragedy now unfolding in Afghanistan.

Until the sudden and complete collapse of the Nato-backed government in Kabul, the Biden administration had enjoyed its very own “special relationship” with the American media. They were frequently thrown soft-ball questions. They were always allowed to point to the villainous Donald Trump whenever they needed a scapegoat. The media corps is always on their side — and who can blame them? You can’t ask tough questions while munching on cookies from the Press Secretary’s mother-in-law. That would be rude.

To listen to Biden’s media cheerleaders over the past seven months has been about as exciting as reading Pravda. “America is back. Trump was an aberration. We are going to bring Americans together and heal. We’re giving people hope and change. Build back better. Let’s get high on DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion).” And so on. God knows it was tedious. But Biden’s team was more than happy to stick to this hymn sheet. Nobody leaked.

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Biden's most heartless betrayal

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

You would have thought that the new administration would have been able to exploit for just a bit longer the narrative of an experienced, selfless, prudent President Biden — the steady hand after the wrecking ball. Where Donald Trump was off-putting, rash and rude, Joe Biden could so easily be presented as cool — those Aviators, man! — thoughtful and cooperative. In short, Biden was poised to become to the United States what Queen Elizabeth is to the United Kingdom: a rock of reliability and continuity, an embodiment of national pride and humility all at once.

Instead, seven months into the administration’s tenure, the Biden administration hunkered down and made a decision that would erase years of progress. It’s all too easy to picture the various individuals, all at the height of their professional careers, huddled together in the Situation Room. Some old and wise. Some fresh-faced and gung-ho. All fooled by the conviction that they can do no wrong.

While Team Biden already resorted to its standard fallback of pointing the finger at Trump — who, admittedly, initiated negotiations with the Taliban and made the original deal to exit Afghanistan — it is the current President who accelerated the plan for full military withdrawal before even attempting to repatriate all American citizens, evacuate our Afghan allies or secure any guarantees on human rights (particularly for Afghan women and girls). It was Blinken who told Senator Lindsey Graham during his confirmation hearing that any US agreement with the Taliban should “absolutely” be “conditions-based”. Where are those conditions now?

Just weeks ago, Biden assured us there would be no images of Americans climbing on roofs to evacuate in helicopters like in Saigon. Now, with the August 31^st deadline looming, it seems increasingly likely that some Americans might not make it out at all. Those who have applied for a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) feel hopelessly abandoned. Our Nato allies look on with horror.

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America's spiteful foreign policy

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Speculation over what compelled Biden’s national security team to withdraw so suddenly without a proper contingency plan remains ongoing. Theories range from shrill claims about how “these men must be evil” to “experts” praising what they deem a calculated, realist approach to a never-ending war that was sapping attention and resources away from the bigger threats posed by China.

The more convincing argument, however, is more straightforward: The Biden administration screwed up because they had grown accustomed to uncritical support from the press. Instead of upholding their traditional role of checking and vetting individuals and decisions, for seven months the media has scarcely offered up a critical word of Biden. It was almost the exact opposite for Trump, who came in for relentless criticism — some of it fictitious.

Of course, nobody enjoys being hauled over the coals by the press corps. But it focuses the mind — unlike canine adulation. If enough people tell you that you’re going to be the most transformative president since Lyndon Johnson, it’s easy to forget how Johnson’s presidency ended.

That honeymoon period is over now. The situation in Kabul is now so dire that there is no option but to report on the failures of the administration. Even our new pedigree of activists journalists, for whom reporting is a form of proselytising, can no longer play defence for the President because the images coming out of Afghanistan are indefensible. When they learn that a toddler of one of our Afghan interpreters has been crushed to death in the vast and desperate scrum outside Kabul airport, Americans are rightly angry.

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The Afghan Resistance has begun

By Bernard-Henri Levy

And so Biden now cuts an altogether different figure. After his briefings, he scurries away, fearing an inquisition. Meanwhile, his press secretary is starting to look like all press secretaries: her jaw set, her eyes tired, her implausible talking points delivered almost defiantly.

For Afghanistan, the return of a critical press corps comes too late. But for Americans there is a lesson to be learned. Perhaps if the liberal media had done a better job during confirmation hearings and appointments, the situation in Afghanistan could have unfolded differently, with more effective leaders at the helm. Perhaps if earlier policy blunders had been subjected to closer scrutiny, this one might not have been so casually made.

“Democracy dies in darkness” was one of the many facile slogans adopted by the anti-Trump press in 2017, as if only their fearless reporting stood between America and a 1930s-style fascist dystopia. But as we are now witnessing, competent government instead dies when the lights are dimmed to flatter a new administration. When journalists and editors suspend their critical faculties, tragedy is bound to follow.

Earlier this week, when the White House’s press spokeswoman Jen Psaki was asked about this ignominious withdrawal, she refused to concede that there was anything wrong with it: “I would say that this is now on track to be the largest airlift in US history. So no, I would not say that it is anything but a success.”

The long-term consequences of the collapse of Afghanistan will naturally take time to come into focus. But it seems unlikely that they will be associated with “success”. Already it seems inevitable that America’s enemies — in particular China — will have noted how easy it is to push around the world’s superpower. Meanwhile, America’s allies now face challenges of their own; the EU and UK now surely know that they need to be more operationally adept, capable of doing basic things like holding an airport without requiring the support of the US.

Of course, none of this can be predicted with absolute certainty. And yet I strongly suspect that there is at least one consequence that Europe can anticipate as a foregone conclusion: that, thanks to the fall of Afghanistan, in the coming months and years the West will experience a new migration challenge that it is incapable of preventing.

Throughout the last decade, the migration crisis in Europe has been exacerbated by the fact that many European governments and citizens had nothing but sympathy for the millions of immigrants — many of them from Syria — whose homelands have been destroyed by war. Indeed, when Angela Merkel steps down this year, she will largely be remembered for her decision in 2015 to open Germany’s borders to Syrian refugees.

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By Aris Roussinos

Yet although there have been large numbers of Syrians among those who arrived in Europe in the past six years, Syrian refugees did not make up the bulk of the arrivals. Instead, the Syrian migrants ended up inadvertently becoming the sharp tip of the world’s migration demands. Behind them came people from a bewildering array of other countries; from across Africa, the Middle East and Far East.

Even then, Afghan refugees were certainly among them. I met many myself in the refugee camps of southern Europe. On one occasion, I spent the day with a group of Hazara Afghans, a persecuted Persian-speaking minority group. I remember one of them asking me why Syrians should be given priority over Afghans when applying for asylum in the EU. After all, he said, by that point Syria had only been at war for five years. His country had been at war for 15 years. Should that not be taken into account?

It was — and remains — an important question. One of the most complex aspects of the global migration challenge is the fact that everybody has a competing claim to asylum, and that privileging one group inevitably comes at the expense of another.

In any case, it is striking that six years ago, Germany and almost every other European country reported the same phenomenon, which was that many people said they were Syrians in order to get into Europe. However, once they were inside, very few countries were able to verify this. And for much of the general public it was enough to be told that Europe was responding to a “refugee” crisis rather than a “migrant crisis”.

Which brings us back to the situation in Afghanistan today. In the coming months and years, there will invariably be a steady flow of refugees fleeing the Taliban’s Afghanistan. The hurried nature of the American departure means that there will have been people left behind who have a credible case for asylum in the West. And as the Taliban’s rule once again reasserts itself, they will attempt to flee.

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At the same time, within the West there will be a prevailing cloud of shame hanging over the way in which Afghanistan has been abandoned. NGOs and other groups will argue that we all have a moral obligation to accept refugees fleeing Afghanistan. As ever, they will not bother specifying where this obligation begins or ends. Many will be persuaded that we are in some way responsible for Afghanistan not being a thriving liberal democracy. They will be told that we are responsible for Afghanistan’s precarious humanitarian situation. And because there will be a grain of truth in this — if nothing else then because of the nature of the exit — it will be exceptionally difficult to reject those claiming to be fleeing Afghanistan.

The problem will lie, as it always does, in the details. No European country or border force has anything like the number of experts required to work out where exactly those entering Europe have come from. The dearth of language experts alone has remained unfixed since 2015. And as a result, no doubt many migrants who are not from Afghanistan will recognise the benefits of pretending that they are.

Some of this will affect America, though its geographic position makes it a less accessible destination. Europe does not have the same luxury. Indeed, one border official I spoke to last week said that the UK is already seeing an increase in the number of people crossing the English Channel claiming to be Afghan refugees. In many cases, this will be untrue. After all, if it were then they got to the UK awfully fast.

But is it so surprising that they would say such a thing? No doubt they are aware that the UK and EU feel morally sordid over the Afghan withdrawal. The smuggling gangs will certainly know this, and will advise migrants on how to use it to their advantage.

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What will make it more complex still is that politicians and the public cannot have an honest conversation about the impact of this new migrant wave. At times of humanitarian crisis such as these, most Western Europeans do not want to hear politicians being “heartless”. But after their experience of 2015, it seems unlikely that they will want them to be too relaxed either.

The British public, for instance, currently believes that it is their moral duty to take in refugees from Afghanistan. But I suspect that feeling will not last indefinitely. It will take years for us to know how many Afghans decide to flee to Europe. It seems likely, though, that while a significant number will come from Afghanistan, an even more significant number will arrive pretending to be Afghans. And once they see Europe welcoming these migrants with open arms, others will likely follow.

There can be little doubt that those concerned about the safety of Afghanistan’s refugees are well-intentioned. But that doesn’t mean those good intentions won’t be exploited. And when that happens, neither European citizens nor European governments will be capable of dealing with the consequences.

One man peddles on a cross trainer; one struggles to operate a weights machine; another uses his arms to work a leg press. Then one hops off an exercise bike and scoots gleefully across the room, squealing with delight.

It’s his look that I can’t forget: his eyes twinkle, his mouth explodes into a grin. It’s the same look that I’ve seen a thousand times on the faces of my godchildren and young cousins when they know they’re misbehaving. The video was of fighters triumphing in a captured building, but it was also of a pack of brutal man-children fooling around with expensive toys they will eventually break. There could be no clearer metaphor for what is happening to Afghanistan.

These men — and they are always men — are always the same; adults who revel in their savagery like misbehaving adolescents, child arsonists driven by the same violent impulses — to shoot a woman for wearing the wrong sort of Naqib or none at all; to kill a man for being the wrong religion; or simply to pull the wings off a fly.

It’s no surprise, then, that Britain, the United States and even the UN are evacuating their embassies as well as — to greater and lesser degrees — the Afghans who worked alongside them and now face torture and death. But while most flee, others see opportunity. Not least Russia and China, who are already exploiting the nascent Taliban monster that is emerging while its creators helicopter themselves to safety.

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By Will Lloyd

If you think the Taliban are a mob of disheveled thugs, you’d be right. But they’re also now a political force that two of the world’s most powerful states want cosy up to — even as their foot soldiers beat and murder in the name of an Islam they long ago perverted for their own ends.

Russia is historically an imperial power; so it is unsurprising that, for Moscow, Afghanistan comes freighted with history. Its “graveyard of Empires” tag may be a cliché but only because it retains so much aphoristic value. The 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan War, a cruel and sanguinary conflict that Russia lost, is carved into the historical memory of both countries. Up to 2 million Afghans were killed, while for the Soviets it hastened the end of the USSR. The bearded features and baggy trousers of the Mujahideen fighter loom large in the PTSD of a generation of Soviet soldiers.

Oliver Carroll, The Independent’s Moscow Correspondent, described Russia’s policy toward the Taliban to me as “pure schizophrenia”. On the one hand, according to its ambassador to Afghanistan, they are reasonable guys, and “not crazy terrorists”. Indeed, they have managed to arrange a deal for the security of the embassy, and have announced what appears to be an exclusive deal to evacuate Afghans “without limit or hindrance”. But, he continues, “the official FSB still officially lists the Taliban as a terror organisation — and everything I’ve seen suggests Russia isn’t ready to remove it”.

It’s a tricky situation for Russia. Authorities across the country — from Chechnya to Dagestan — have spent years terrifying their people about the radical Islamic threat, and Muslims generally. Yet Russia is also concerned about its diminishing influence in its former central Asian colonies, three of which — Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan — border Afghanistan. All now fear not only refugee flows but the increased threat of Taliban cross-border attacks and terrorism.

The Kremlin is therefore selling its diplomatic efforts with the Taliban to its people as the pursuit of national interests — nothing more. At any rate, Moscow prides itself on what it calls its “multivector foreign policy” of cosying up to Iran and Israel, Qatar and the Saudis, Azeris and Armenians, and Turkey and the Kurds. Look for logic there and feel your head spin.

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Then there is the question of that classic political obsession: state competition. Carroll’s contacts in the Russian foreign ministry are, he says, obviously happy at the clear defeat for a rival ideology — and what it shows potential US allies in Central Asia. There is, he told me, “lots of glee on the fall of a major pillar of US foreign policy. Russian propaganda is going in for the kill on Joe Biden, presenting him as a hypocrite only interested in the US. TV is showing lots of footage of the poor Afghan in the undercarriages of planes, juxtaposed with Biden declaring that “I wouldn’t do anything different.’”

But there are limits to this reading. First off, Russia knows that, whatever happens, it will sooner or later have to deal with huge migrant flows pressing on its borders. Millions will now start to flee the Taliban’s barbarity — something Moscow has neither the cash nor inclination to deal with. This might give it a reason to return to “police” its former colonies, but it will also be an economic, security and public relations headache.

And the Russians are not stupid. Too close association with what is a variegated mob of Jihadist slaughterers (despite their recent attempts at PR) will no doubt soon backfire. Already videos of Taliban atrocities are unspooling across social media. Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov’s description of the Taliban as “reasonable” was foolish when he said it and will only look worse as time goes on. That’s why many in Russia will remain cautious. After all, an alliance with Moscow might suit the Taliban for now — but how long until they decide that Russians are infidels, too?

For China, meanwhile, the problem is first and foremost one of security. China shares a 57-mile border with Afghanistan. And with the Taliban in control, Beijing fears the jihadists next door might let the Uyghur-militias who have escaped use Afghanistan as a springboard to attack Xinjiang, which lies close to the border. There is form here. In 2020, reports surfaced that foreign fighters showing up in Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan included Uyghurs, who ran their own terror organisations but were happy to collaborate.

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Then, as always with China, there is the question of resources. Afghanistan may be famous for violence and war but it is also estimated to have between $1-$3 trillion worth of rare earth materials (used in tech, automotives, clean energy and defence). China has about 35% of global reserves but in 2018 produced 70% of total rare earths. Doing a deal with the Taliban, then, could be tempting.

Indeed, perhaps it’s not surprising that China recognised the Taliban government from the get go, with Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, Hua Chunying, announcing last week that she “looks forward to China’s participation in Afghanistan’s reconstruction and development”. In fact, it seems they knew it was coming. Just weeks before the Taliban’s advance to Kabul, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with Head of the Afghan Taliban Political Commission, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, to reaffirm friendly cooperation between the two countries and the “just and positive” role of China in Afghanistan’s peace and reconciliation process.

This is all deliberate. Good relations can give China access to a resource bonanza. It would enable Beijing to do what it’s been doing in Africa for years: hoover everything up, and power a final march to global hegemony.

Meanwhile, in terms of PR, Beijing is also more than happy to see two decades of pious American rhetoric about bringing freedom to Afghanistan end in the images of Afghans tumbling to their deaths from the undercarriage of fleeing US planes. Washington looks incompetent, heartless and most of all an unreliable, if not outright dishonest, ally.

And so for now, Russia and China will happily cosy up to Kabul, while pursuing their respective interests, united by common goals of expanding their influence, protecting their borders and seeing the Americans chased out of the region. Both countries have more to win than to lose from cooperation with the Taliban.

But neither should feel assured. This gang of fanatics is only just getting started. The problem with monsters is that they are difficult to control — as every nation who has ever tried to meddle in Afghanistan has learned to their cost.

But it’s coming true with Biden.

And historians will never stop wondering what could have induced the 46th president of the United States to commit such a grievous error.

Is it the naïveté of a politician lacking any sense of history or tragedy, the one who took the Taliban at their word when they assured us of their peaceful intentions in Doha in February 2020?

Is it the cynicism of a president already looking ahead to his re-election and pandering to those in swing-states who are said to be fed up with “endless wars”?

Is it an effect of a swing of the pendulum between the four major poles of American diplomacy laid out by Walter Russell Mead: Wilsonianism and its democratic messianism; Jeffersonianism and its hard and fast isolationism; Jacksonianism and its reflex to give tit for tat, but only when US interests appear directly targeted; and Hamiltonianism and the formulation, so dear to France’s Montesquieu, that America’s only truly vital interests were those of peaceful commerce?

Or is this a new pole altogether? One pioneered by Barack Obama in August 2013, when he declined to enforce the red line that he had said would be irretrievably crossed if the Syrian leader resorted to the use of chemical weapons against his own citizens? The one at work when, without warning or any shred of moral or strategic interest, Donald Trump abandoned his country’s Kurdish allies, first in Iraq when he allowed the pro-Iranian militias to invade Kirkuk, then in Syria when he allowed Erdogan’s murderous proxies to enter Rojava? The one brought to its culmination in the present Afghan rout, this abject display of open desertion being broadcast live to the world and punctuated, as I write, by scenes of panic and chaos at Kabul airport that could easily be mistaken for those in Saigon in 1975?

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Is it, in other words, the consolidation of a trend that I first sensed almost twenty years ago, when writing American Vertigo and later developed in The Empire and the Five Kings? Gone the great power, which has jettisoned its dreams of exceptionalism, its ambition to be a shining city upon a hill! Broken, the gracious Virgilian thread that made the invention of America a new Aeneid whose mission was no longer to rebuild Troy in Rome or Rome on a grand scale in Europe, but to reinvent Europe with improvements! Onward toward a new pre-Columbian order in which the old empire, in retreat, no longer counts and makes way for the latter-day reincarnations of the Ottoman Empire, Greater Persia, Great Russia, Imperial China, and, as here, the new Ummah made possible by a radical misreading of the Koran!

It is too early to know for certain.

And each of these explanations is at least partially true.

But the time has come for a review of accounts.

And that review shows that what the most pessimistic of us feared must be booked not just as a loss but as an abomination in three parts:

1. The wolves are through the gate

They are hunting down the supporters of republican government and institutions, as well as my journalist friends from Tolo News.

They are sending women back to their fabric prisons after many thousands of them had tasted dignity and become accustomed to gender equality and the freedom to show their faces.

Sharia is the law of the land.

Lists of suspects, banned and “wanted” people are being posted at the entrances to neighbourhoods, sounding an ominous clarion call.

Islamic tribunals will soon be operating at full speed, with their absurd crimes and atrocious punishments.

And the scenes of stoning that have been filmed over the past few months in remote villages will be reenacted live in Herat, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul, sites of high civilisation where the descendants of horsemen and poets had begun to embrace the democratic dream.

A people are in agony.

The triumph of a strain of barbarism that, twenty years ago, the great democracies and their Afghan allies easily defeated and whose legions of rabble on motorbikes are no more formidable today than they were back then.

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And of naïveté, when the American administration, speaking through national security adviser Jake Sullivan, adds credulity to dishonour by accepting the Taliban’s word that it is ready to “protect” civilians seeking to be evacuated from the country while offering dubious evidence of good intentions.

Worse than a crime, this is a mistake.

And, worse than a mistake, it is a stain.

A stain on the term of Joe Biden, whose first dramatic error this is.

But also, in a greater sense, this stain dishonours the modern conscience. It will take a long time for that conscience to forget this failure, this shame.

2. And what of the United States?

Already devalued by the sacrifice of the Kurds on the altar of appeasement, first toward Iran (the Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq) and then toward Turkey (the Kurds in Syria), the word of the United States is suddenly worth nothing.

Imagine you are a Ukrainian in Donbass battling, in the trenches of Luhansk or Donetsk, pro-Russian separatists and mercenaries in the pay of the Kremlin.

An Armenian in Nagorno-Karabakh who has learned that the resentment of those pining for a return of the Ottoman Empire and denying the genocide of their ancestors knows no bounds or limitations.

Or a Taiwanese, South Korean or even a Japanese sensing the nearby presence of the iron jaw of Chinese totalitarianism just waiting to bite.

To say nothing of the Balts, the Poles, the Czechs — of Europeans, in other words — who had been living, like the generation of the founders of Europe, in the belief that venerable old treaties protected them and ensured their security.

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What do they all think of this self-inflicted Saigon? This geopolitical suicide? How can they avoid ruminating on the betrayal and massacre of Carthage’s Punic allies, as recounted by Gustave Flaubert in his novel Salammbô, when confronted with this spectacle, this disarray in a diplomatic system that has made the inexplicable choice, just weeks before the anniversary of September 11, of returning Afghanistan to the terrorists on a silver platter and allowing them to build a nest for the vipers of the new Al-Qaeda and their ilk? When confronted, yes, with the direct, deliberate and slow-motion abandonment of a people who, like the Kurds, were our rampart against radical Islam and protected the world from terrorism? Under the circumstances, how is it possible not to conclude that if Putin, Erdogan or Xi got it in his head to fill part of the void created by the American retreat there would be no one to oppose him?

Dizzying.

An Afghan Anschluss.

Munich on all fronts.

And even if one must be wary of comparing the incomparable, this is truly terrible.

3. But then, there is Panjshir

There remains, living in his homeland of Panjshir, one young man, Ahmad Massoud, son of the legendary Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, who, in his day, embodied the struggle against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and who was assassinated two days before September 11.

A few days ago, just a few hours after the fall of Kabul, the young Ahmad Massoud was able to elude the hired killers sent to track him down.

Knowing that if they captured him, he might suffer the same fate as his illustrious father, he did exactly what his father had done, a little less than twenty-five years ago, after the first fall of Kabul, when he managed to get hold of one of the last old helicopters that the Taliban had not yet taken over and took refuge in his bastion in Panjshir, above the Shomali Plain, to organise the Afghan resistance.

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He wrote to me from his native village on Monday (16 August), several hours after rejoining his commanders.

“We find ourselves,” he wrote, “in the situation of Europe in 1940.”

The debacle is complete, he continued.

The spirit of collaboration is all around us.

Subjugation is closing in with sound and fury.

As Kabul groans, as the villages of the north and south are put in chains, vengeance is unfurling over our wounded land.

But despite reversal and even catastrophe, all is not lost, he told me.

With my Mujahideen, I intend to resume the struggle.

I call on all free women and men in the world, friends of Afghanistan old and young, to join us in spirit.

I call on all free fighters from all over the country, whatever their origin or ethnicity, to come to our valleys.

Already, he continued, groups of brave citizens are moving to the front with their creed, their bravery, and their antique rifles and grenade launchers.

I welcome them!

They will be — we will be — the living faces of the Resistance, and, soon enough, of the counteroffensive.

Free Afghanistan has lost Kabul, but it has not lost the war.

Massoud’s words were the words of the Spanish republicans in 1936.

Of Czech president Beneš in 1939 and of Alija Izetbegović, in 1992, at the height of the siege of Sarajevo, when he gave me a dramatic message to pass on to French president François Mitterrand.

Almost word for word, they are the words of General de Gaulle’s radio address to his defeated countrymen in June 1940, broadcast from London, in which he urged them not to submit but to continue to fight.

Except that the Afghans were betrayed, the young Massoud pointed out. Betrayed but not defeated. And they were not defeated because their leadership, their generals, did not even take them into battle.

* * *

I know this young man, just as I knew his father.

I have done numerous video interviews in the mountains of Panjshir, where, for a year, Massoud has been quietly preparing for the worst and stockpiling arms, equipment and supplies, as his father had done.

I trust him.

I believe him when he says he inherited from his father the taste for freedom and the instinct of fighting to defend it.

I believe him when he insists that he has no choice and that the fight is now ineluctably his, body and soul.

I believe that when he issues a call for all free Afghans who love their country and reject servitude, whether living in Afghanistan or abroad, to join him, he is not only sincere but credible.

At my initiative, France’s President Macron received him at the Elysée Palace on April 5, 2021.

I was present at that meeting, where the best of France appeared to have a rendezvous with an heir to the noblest anti-totalitarian and anti-fascist struggles of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

And I am convinced that, in the new Great Game that lies ahead, it is this young man whom France, Britain and the rest of Europe will have to support.

In this area of the world, he is the embodiment of the future and of hope.

Really? It seems to me that the similarities between Vietnam in 1975 and Afghanistan in 2021 are unmistakable. Indeed, they were openly debated in the floor of the House of Commons, in yesterday’s debate. As Iain Duncan Smith put it: “the parallels [are] shocking, but also very true… this is a shame on all of us.”

In Vietnam, America found itself fighting in hostile terrain against a fanatical foe. Every strategy and tactic failed: counter-insurgency, troop surges, novel weaponry. Propping up a corrupt, unpopular government, the Americans came to realise that defeat was inevitable — and so they negotiated with the enemy and withdrew their troops. From that point, the fall of the capital was only a matter of time — though less time than anticipated. When the final collapse happened, it’s speed took the world by surprise.

Given this precedent, it is astonishing that the Americans didn’t see what might happen in Afghanistan — but they were blind to it. Back in July, Mystic Blinken made this prediction: “We are staying, the embassy is staying, our programs are staying. If there is a significant deterioration in security… I don’t think it’s going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday.” He was exactly wrong — the Afghan government collapsed in one weekend.

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In Kabul, we didn’t just get helicopters lifting off from the embassy roof, but also troop transports taking off from the airport with people clinging desperately to the sides. Tragically, those who held on longest tumbled to their deaths. And thus 20 years after the the Falling Man of 9/11, we had the falling men of Kabul — the horrific bookends of a disastrous foreign policy. 

Except, the story doesn’t end there. The knock-on effects will be felt for years, not least by those left behind. As for America, one can foresee a contemporary version of the “Vietnam syndrome” —  a crippling loss of national confidence. Globally, the enemies of the West will be emboldened, just as they were in the 1970s. Now, as then, the sense of doom is palpable.

But before we succumb to despair, its worth remembering the most salient fact of the post-Saigon era — which is that we survived. To paraphrase a song of the era, the West did not crumble. America did not lay down and die. The 1970s may have been a decade of defeat — but we can also see the retreat from Vietnam as a prelude to the 1980s and victory in the Cold War. 

Believe it or not, there are positive lessons that can be learned from this period.

Let’s begin with what didn’t happen after the Fall of Saigon. According to the Cold War “domino theory“, allowing the loss of one country to the communists would mean that neighbouring countries would soon follow. But that didn’t happen in South East Asia. Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia — the components of what had been French Indo-China — were all lost in the same year. But that was as far as it went. 

The remaining dominoes — Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines — didn’t topple. Instead, the communist powers turned on one another — the Russian-Chinese split intensified, China invaded Vietnam and Vietnam invaded Cambodia. 

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Most of this was predicted by the CIA as early as 1967 — in a secret memo presented by its then director Richard Helms. As Mark Atwood Lawrence — a historian of the Vietnam War and director of the LBJ Presidential Library points out — it was clear both that Vietnam would fall to the communists and that the communist threat could be contained. 

We should have accepted the inevitable in Afghanistan too — because that’s also been obvious for years. We’ve known with absolute certainty that the former Afghan government was wholly dependent on the Americans — and wholly incapable of taking the lead against the Taliban. They should have been cut loose a decade ago. 

Of course, the argument against doing so was the same as it was in Vietnam — which is that abandoning allies, however unreliable, undermines confidence in Western resolve. But that only makes sense if one assumes that our resources are limitless. Quite clearly, they are not — and thus need to be deployed where they can make the biggest difference. 

Indeed, it is precisely because our resolve is so important that we should never test it where it can’t be sustained. Beyond the borders of the West that means fighting in support of local allies, but never in their place. We can help, but they must lead. A coalition of the willing is of no use unless it is also able. 

Yes, that’s not always obvious from the outset. Situations can deteriorate, especially when our allies lose credibility with their own people. Which is why we must be ready to withdraw and do so without hesitation. 

While we naturally associate retreat with defeat, many of the most successful leaders in history were those who mastered reverse gear. From the Russian evacuation of Moscow in 1812 to miracle of Dunkirk in 1940, going backwards is sometimes the only way forward. Or to quote General Oliver P Smith — who commanded the US 1st Marine Division during the Korean War — “we’re not retreating, we’re just advancing in a different direction”.

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The principle applies at a territorial scale too.

When great powers withdraw from unwinnable situations that doesn’t always mean the beginning of the end. Often it’s the opposite. Just think about our own history. Time and again the English (or British) have withdrawn from territories — for instance the Danelaw in the dark ages, Aquitaine in the Middle Ages and America in the 18th century, only to rise again stronger than before. 

Another example is the Roman Empire in the third century, which by 270 AD was on the brink of collapse. But then along came the Emperor Aurelian. Realising that the situation on the Danube frontier was hopeless he ordered the entire province of Dacia to be abandoned. A tough call, but in withdrawing the legions to defensible borders he saved the Empire and earned himself the title of “Restorer of the World”. 

I doubt that anyone will be calling Joe Biden Restitutor Orbis anytime soon, but if he wants to restore his reputation — and save the West — then he too must redeploy the resources at his command.

In today’s world, the boundaries of the West aren’t just defined by geographical territory, but by financial, technological and other networks that span the globe. And it is here that our defences need repairing. 

While we’ve spent twenty years and two trillion dollars fighting unwinnable wars far from home, we’ve opened our own gates to the influence of hostile foreign powers. We’ve sold out our workers to profit from cheap labour overseas. We’ve flogged off our land to foreign investors while our young people struggle to own homes. We’re building sensitive infrastructure, including nuclear power stations, with Chinese technology. And we’re building pipelines to increase our dependency on Russian fossil fuels. 

Writing for UnHerd this week, Paul Kingsnorth claimed that the West is suffering a civilisational crisis. Despite the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan, he argues that we are not “short on ideas, arguments… or world-saving machines”, but that we are “very short on saints.” 

I agree about the saints, but not with the first part of his argument. If we can’t even build 5G networks without Chinese involvement then our civilisation is falling apart at the machine level too.

Doubtless this all stems from a deep spiritual malaise, but even the dead-souled technocrats who run our lives should be able to fix our broadband. This week the era of nation-building abroad came to an end. We would do well to replace it with an era of nation-building at home.

As I listened to those words, I found myself admiring the political skill of Biden’s speechwriters — and despising their utter callousness. I wanted to shout at the TV: But what about the 19 million women now sentenced by American foreign policy to a life of darkness under the Taliban? Surely they deserve human rights, too?

Do you seriously expect anyone to believe that American diplomacy will make the Taliban treat women fairly? Is “rallying the world” remotely likely to keep Afghan girls in schools, or allow women to walk down the streets of Kabul with their faces uncovered? Do you take us all for fools?

The Biden administration’s cool, calculated and yet incompetent abandonment of the Afghan people stems from two core problems.

The first is a failure of imagination. Biden claimed to have planned for every contingency. So did he not consider evacuating the Afghans who qualified for special immigrant visas and their families (an estimated 80,0000 individuals) before withdrawing all US special forces? Was the pandemonium at the airport so very hard to foresee?

On a larger scale, there was a massive failure to imagine what American interests in the region are, how to protect them and what the repercussions of ignoring them could be. To Biden, America’s “only vital national interest in Afghanistan … [is] preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland”. This is short-sighted.

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In reality, this chaotic, humiliating withdrawal significantly increases the risk of a terror attack on the US homeland. Aside from revealing a dysfunctional American foreign policy apparatus, in intelligence terms Afghanistan is now a black hole. Even if we are able to extricate some of our Afghan intelligence assets, the US has lost a key source of information on jihadist activity.

A little bit more imagination would also have revealed how China, Iran and other current adversaries will likely use the Afghan fiasco to their advantage. Did the President not consider how his actions in Afghanistan could embolden Xi Jinping’s dream of a “reunification” with Taiwan?  Is the US now in a stronger or weaker negotiating position with regard to the Iranian regime? Did the President project enough power this week to convince his Russian counterpart to crack down on the ransomware attacks that appear to emanate from his territory?

And what about our allies? Will India trust the US as the leading partner of the Quad (along with Australia and Japan) designed to check the growing power of China? How about our European partners and the transatlantic alliance?

The second problem informing Biden’s approach concerns the moral decay of Western civilisation. When a fish decays, the head rots first. The same can be said for the West. We’ve become so focused on microaggressions in America that we have lost sight of the macroaggressions happening to women around the world.

In my latest book, Prey, I argue that the modern-day feminist movement in the West does not take seriously the concerns of women in working-class communities, many of whom have immigrant backgrounds, and who face a steady rise of sexual harassment and assault on the streets of their own neighbourhoods.

In today’s perverse American culture, however, more attention is devoted to the use of preferred gender pronouns than to the plight of women whose most basic rights — to education, personal autonomy, the right to be present in a public space — are either removed or under serious threat.

What we’ve witnessed this week in Afghanistan is a watershed moment in Western decline. American culture today tells us not to be proud of our country; not to believe in the superiority of American values; not to promote the rights we are afforded by our Constitution so that they can be enjoyed by people around the world.

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When rights are promoted, they tend to be “progressive” interpretations. We’ve reached a point where we proudly flew the LGBT flag from our embassy in Kabul when the going was good, but have now abandoned Afghanistan’s gay population to the Taliban. Meanwhile, the US Navy’s reading list now includes books such as Sexual Minorities and Politics and How to be an Antiracist, both of which paint a bleak picture of the United States, its history and its identity.

How, then, can we hope to defend the basic rights of women and minorities elsewhere? American self-confidence has morphed into nihilism; we’re all talk and no action beyond retreat. That is why women’s rights activists, interpreters and anyone who has worked with the American people have been forced to hide in Afghanistan while the Taliban go door-to-door looking for them.

What will now happen to the women of Afghanistan? When asked if women’s rights will be respected, the Taliban governor of the Andar district in Ghazni province, Mawlavey Kamiil, said: “We assure this to people all over the world, especially the people of Afghanistan: Islam has given rights to everyone equally. Women have their own rights. How much Islam has given rights to women, we will give them that much.” Similarly, a member of the Taliban’s cultural commission, Enamullah Samangani, has promised that women “should be in the government structure according to Sharia law”.

This caveat is important: women will only have the rights afforded to them by Islam. Under orthodox Sharia law, women can inherit property but not at the same level as men (generally half as much); women can testify in court but their testimony is not equal to a man’s word; women have a right to divorce under specific circumstances but not a unilateral right (as men have); a male guardian is essential for a woman; a woman can have one husband whereas a man can have up to four wives.

Yet the texts of Sharia law do not fully capture the brutal reality of daily life for women under a regime like the Taliban’s. In the last period of Taliban rule, which ended with the invasion of 2001, women were forced to wear the burka when outside, if they were allowed to leave the house at all. They were not educated in any meaningful sense (other than, in some cases, the most basic religious education). They were forced into marriages (often as young girls) with men who used them as chattels. Brutal punishments for small transgressions made women little better than slaves.

We must not forget Bibi Aisha, who was featured on the cover of TIME Magazine in 2010. As a young woman, she attempted to escape from her abusive husband (whom she had been forced to marry), but when the Taliban caught her, they had her ears and nose chopped off. Or Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in 2012 by a Taliban fighter because she dared to advocate for girl’s education.

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Now, the Taliban are claiming that women and girls will be able to continue their education, as long as they wear full burkas. Taliban spokesperson Suhail Shaheen explained that the “policy is that women can have access to education and to work”. However, the reality for Afghan women seems rather different; they are now, for example, barely to be seen on the streets of Afghan cities.

Yes, the “modernised” Taliban has done some media training, but we should not be fooled. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan will be governed by the same draconian Sharia law as the Taliban regime of the past. Reports are already emerging of girls being taken as child brides, with the Taliban “ordering local religious leaders to give them a list of girls over 15 years of age and widows under 45” to marry their fighters.

Women’s faces are being whitewashed from billboards throughout Kabul. Women in Kandahar have been told not to return to their jobs at Azizi Bank, and that instead “male relatives could take their place”. In a small village in the Faryan province, the Taliban knocked on doors and demanded to be fed. If women protested, they were beaten and even killed. This is just the beginning.

Over the last several days, I’ve wept bitter tears for the women and girls whose futures are now blighted through no fault of their own. I have felt an overwhelming sense of impotence, even as I have personally tried to help get vulnerable people out of Kabul. But this sense of impotence is now giving way to a feeling of anger and of renewed purpose.

We have to do better. We have to solve this disease of moral decay within our own society and improve our imaginative skills. American decline is not inevitable. It is a choice. Standing by our allies is a choice. Standing up for human rights is a choice.

Having blundered into this wholly predictable mess, Biden has no option but to fight until every American is safely out of Afghanistan. But he can’t stop there. He should throw his weight behind saving every Afghan who has risked life and limb for America. He needs to get women’s rights activists and leaders out of the country.

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan may be the future for Afghanistan. But it can’t be the future for the brave people who risked their lives to fight barbarity.

It is more dispiriting, from a British perspective, to realise that our own elites are, if anything, even worse. Observing the efforts of backbench Conservative MPs to summon up interest in a crusade to defend the Kabul government’s writ on a country where its own regional governors and security forces are either surrendering en masse to the Taliban or actively defecting to their side is concerning enough. When we see our defence minister doing the same, we should be worried.

As I begin writing this article, Kabul’s sphere of influence barely extends to the city limits; whether it will extend that far by the time I’ve finished is doubtful. President Ghani has fled the country; the Taliban are inside the presidential palace. There is no Afghan state left to defend. There is no Afghan army to support. And even if there were, given the British Army’s total inability to pacify one single Afghan province, Helmand, with the constant support of American air power that will no longer exist by the end of this month, it is far beyond our capacity even to dream of doing so. It is no good saying something must be done, after twenty failed years of trying everything. The Afghan war is over, and we lost.

Equally, the meaningless noises being emitted by Labour’s leadership that somehow the UK can gather key stakeholders around a table and hammer out a solution that is distinct from Taliban victory are simply gibberish of the highest order. The Taliban is already doing so, negotiating the surrender of the Kabul government’s military and administrative functionaries through the mediation of tribal elders and religious clerics, and are doing so far more effectively than Lisa Nandy will ever be capable of.

Indeed, the central fact of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan over the past two weeks, under-emphasised though it may be by the solipsistic tone of Western discourse, is precisely how little fighting has been involved. The Taliban has taken over provinces one after the other with barely a shot being fired. When even long-time anti-Taliban leaders like the veteran warlord Ismail Khan, who once ruled the western region of Herat like a medieval king, are meekly submitting to their rule, or even being deployed to Kabul to negotiate the Government’s surrender on the Taliban’s behalf, the ability of even such diplomatic titans as Starmer’s front bench to change the outcome of the war must be firmly ruled out.

If anything, the nature of the Taliban takeover offers glimpses of how they may approach their second period of rule. Their emphasis on seizing power, in these final stages, through negotiation rather than open conflict, accords well with traditional Afghan, particularly Pashtun, systems of dispute settlement.

In fact, the nature of the transfer of power elicits many parallels with the newish social-scientific sub-discipline of rebel governance studies, which aims to unsettle the Hobbesian norms dominant in International Relations theory which hold that only states can provide stable governance, and that non-state actors necessarily leave anarchy and violence in their wake.

This is not so: a burgeoning crop of academic literature focusing on rebel governance in Latin America, Africa, South Asia and the Middle East highlights how, in fact, non-state actors across the world win popular support or at least acquiescence through a variety of methods, including the provision of services such as justice and dispute resolution, medical services, sharing of power through local government and appeals to traditional or other forms of moral authority not open to either the central state or external intervening powers.

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As it happens, I’m currently engaged in PhD research looking at rebel governance in Northeast Syria manifest by the Kurdish-led, radical Left-wing Democratic Union Party. The initial Taliban effort, despite their coming from entirely the opposite ideological pole, strongly suggests the utility of this approach in divining what Taliban 2.0 rule may look like for Afghanistan. Firstly, as already noted, the Taliban’s recourse to mediation through pillars of traditional moral and political authority like the clergy and tribal leaders in seizing power supports observations social scientists have derived from fieldwork in Afghanistan.

The counterinsurgency, or COIN doctrine, that so enamoured American generals and their British military hangers-on in the early and mid-2000s, held that external intervening powers could “lend” legitimacy to the embattled central state through infrastructural and other projects, which led, in Afghanistan’s case, to ambitious and ultimately fruitless showpiece schemes like the British Army’s escorting of equipment for a hydroelectric dam across Taliban-held Helmand.

Yet fieldwork in Afghanistan especially shows the precise opposite: the dependency on external powers taints the central government it is intended to support in the eyes of traditional rural populations, who are generally unsupportive of foreign occupations. COIN doctrine is based on a fundamental misapprehension of the nature of political legitimacy: local actors, embedded within and drawn from the ranks of local populations, will almost always be able to outcompete both the central state and even the most well-meaning and idealistic of colonial administrators in the battle for hearts and minds.

Already, the Taliban have issued numerous proclamations assuring the administrative functionaries of what we must now call the former government of amnesty: captured soldiers are being released, surrendered regional governors escorted back to Kabul, and bank workers, street cleaners, school teachers and traffic police told to resume their work — with some exceptions. Female bank tellers have, apparently, been ordered home in Herat, and replaced with their male relatives; female school teachers told they are only allowed to continue working if they don the chador, and their female pupils the hijab. Taliban governance in its second iteration is likely to be as restrictive for women as it was in its first.

This does not necessarily dampen the group’s legitimacy across the country; indeed, in the conservative rural provinces it may well enhance it. Yet in any case, the United States did not enter Afghanistan to advance the rights of women: if that was the West’s overriding concern, it would not have helped topple the previous communist regime, for whom gender equality was a major cause.

The cause of advancing gender equality in Kabul or Herat or Mazar-i-Sharif is a noble one, yet if the downstream consequence of enabling women’s rights in the cities is CIA-backed death squads murdering teenage boys in their village homes at night, the moral calculus is less clear. Biden, like Trump before him, has made the conclusion that the costs are not worth the benefits. Whether, once Taliban rule is secured, both international and local pressure can salvage some of the gains made for Afghan women is an open question  There is, at this point, no other alternative policy in any case. We shall see.

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This is not to underplay the brutality the Taliban are capable of. Working in Herat in 2014, I met and interviewed harmless Afghan peasants who had their fingers amputated for the crime of voting in the country’s democratic elections, part of the Taliban campaign to dissuade ordinary Afghans, through fear, of engaging with the rival central government. Already we have seen Taliban fighters summarily execute members of government-backed militias they accuse of atrocities against captured Taliban, and they have announced that there will be no mercy for either the country’s erstwhile president Ghani or the Uzbek warlord Marshal Dostum, both of whom, in any case, seem to have already fled the country.

Yet as the rebel governance literature shows, most violence occurs when control of a country is contested between two forces of more or less equal reach: once firm dominance is established by either party, local legitimacy tends to be achieved by amnesties in exchange for submitting to the victor’s authority, a process which we see occur in civil war after civil war. In any case, it must be noted that the measured application of brutality as often affords local legitimacy as it erodes it. The Taliban began, after all, as a local protest movement against the sexual abuse of young boys by warlord militia commanders, who they then hanged from tank barrels to local acclaim.

But the Taliban doesn’t just seek local legitimacy: for their rule to thrive they also need international legitimacy, and though it is very early days, much of their recent output seems designed to secure it. They have already reassured both China and Russia that they have no desire to export disorder beyond their borders, and are likely to be rewarded with recognition, and even investment, once they take Kabul.

For the Taliban to secure recognition from the European Union, which is keen to either continue or resume the deportation of Afghan asylum seekers from within its borders, it will be necessary to avoid the ethnic and sectarian persecutions that marred their previous term of rule. Already, we have seen the Taliban assure Shia worshippers that they will be allowed to worship openly under Taliban protection, and have appointed an ethnic Hazara governor for the Shia ethnic Hazara Bamiyan region, where they have taken control, so far, without firing a shot.

Their seizure of power first focussed on the the Dari and Uzbek-speaking strongholds of the Northern Alliance that had long resisted their rule, with the result that they now control more of the country than they did on 9/11. Minorities with long histories of resistance against and persecution by the Taliban will naturally fear what will come next: yet if the price of international recognition from external powers is delegation of local governance to ethnic minority leaders — as we are already seeing — and the avoidance of senseless killing for the sake of it, then there is every chance that this is what will result.

The present-day Taliban has already shown itself as a sophisticated and competent diplomatic actor on both the world and local stage: it is far from certain that they are so wedded to killing that they will forego the lavish reconstruction money certain to head their way if they can avoid it.

As for recognition by the United States, it will surely come in time: the Taliban were welcome diplomatic interlocutors before 9/11, and their campaign against their mutual enemy the Islamic State, which will now be pursued with all the American weaponry they have captured from the collapsing Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police, will eventually make them a useful, if distant de facto partner.

It is strange to see an American foreign policy establishment which urges American engagement or even support for Syrian jihadist factions ideologically indistinct from the Taliban so distraught at the outcome in Afghanistan. If a qualified outreach can be made to even former al-Qaeda factions in Syria, including ones led by veterans of the Afghan jihad deployed by the al-Qaeda leader himself, on the basis that they promise not to attack the West, then it is difficult to see why the same logic cannot be applied further from the West’s shores.

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Whether or not the Taliban will continue to provide a haven for the al-Qaeda leadership is another question: but America’s notional ally Pakistan already does, with little censure. In any case, as in northwestern Syria, the United States retains the capability to assassinate senior al-Qaeda figures through carefully targeted drone strikes with minimal collateral damage, and with far less costs involved than in the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan.

So, at this stage, it looks like we are observing the dying days, even hours, of the American phase of the Afghan War. We must hope that the end of Afghanistan’s more than forty years of civil conflict are also drawing to a close. Afghanistan will still need Western support for reconstruction, the financial lures of which ought to be used to salvage what can be salvaged of the genuine advances for human rights made over the past two decades across the government-controlled portions of the country.

Whether the Taliban leadership, in Doha or in Pakistan, can maintain effective enough control of their fighters on the ground, buoyed by victory, to prevent a repeat of the urban fighting that destroyed Kabul in the 1990s is now the most pressing question; whether the assurances of amnesty and cooperation the Taliban leadership are giving its defeated opponents can be trusted, or whether they will revert to totalitarian excess, is the next.

Yet if the initial signs of Taliban political outreach to its conquered enemy are sustained over time, then the results might be similar to the 2001 offer they made to hand over Bin Laden for trial and engage in power-sharing negotiations, which the Americans rebuffed. Perhaps some Western leader, somewhere, will learn something from all this: from the evidence so far, that remains doubtful. But either way, whatever happens in Afghanistan now is up to Afghans to decide.