“A good decision, horribly executed”: it is, with hindsight, the judgment of a chronicler of the Washington Post, David Ignatius, on the withdrawal from Afghanistan. “A year after the fall of Kabul, the withdrawal operated by the Biden government appears in a more favorable light: it was a pragmatic decision to end a costly war” which will have lasted twenty years, he underlines.
“Imagine if we were still fighting the Taliban when Russia invaded Ukraine in February, or when China was threatening Taiwan. As for the terrorist risk, the drone strike that killed Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri in July gives hope that it can be controlled remotely, as the Biden government claims.
However, the operation was particularly badly carried out, in particular because the Pentagon and the State Department (equivalent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) implemented “fundamentally contradictory policies”, writes this specialist in defense issues.
Too pessimistic predictions
“The fall of Kabul was a debacle but its long-term impact did not turn out to be as catastrophic as feared,” also believes a columnist of the Los Angeles Times, Doyle