Catastrophe in Afghanistan — for Afghans, Israel, the region… and for America
Like every national leader, the president of the United States has a prime obligation to safeguard the security and well-being of his citizens. And like his predecessor Donald Trump, President Joe Biden concluded that the presence of US troops and contractors in Afghanistan was having the opposite effect — that the American military deployment, as Biden put it on Monday, was “not in our national security interest.”
Thousands of Americans had lost their lives in the course of the 20-year war since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when the Bush administration began targeting Afghanistan for harboring al-Qaeda terrorists. And Biden, inheriting an agreement to withdraw the last few thousand US troops, decided to go ahead with it and, he said this week, avoid a “third decade” of war.
Before we get into the profound and dismal wrongheadedness of this decision — which in a matter of a few days has seen the United States humiliated and weakened in the eyes, most especially, of its Islamist enemies — we should note that Israel has twice in recent decades carried out its own hasty military withdrawals on our very own doorstep, under circumstances and with consequences it has to some extent lived to regret.
Read More: Times of Israel