Upon completion of one year of return to power of the taliban After the destruction of the regime of President Ashraf Ghani, the most well-intentioned forecasts that could have been made have been widely denied by reality. Afghanistan today is a country with an economy devastated by the incompetence of its rulers and the lack of international aid; a society subject to the arbitrariness of power and the rigor of Sharia law that has degraded the status of women to that of second-class citizens; a territory that probably shelters the Al Qaeda leadership again as it did in the past. These are the fruits of the lack of foresight of the United States and its allies from the moment in which NATO – April of last year – announced the total evacuation of the country and condemned to defeat the regime protected until then by the allies, extremely weak and that never controlled the entire territory.
Afghanistan is again a problem in the heart of Asia, a source of instability in an already unstable and problematic environment, in which different factions of jihadism have found accommodation. The errors of appreciation of NATO analysts, and particularly of the White House, who estimated in six months the time it would take for the Taliban to take power from the beginning of the evacuation, went to waste: in four months, from April 14 to August 15, the Taliban mobilization defeated the Afghan Army and occupied Kabul. From there, the retreat was a compendium of chaos and incompetence that left many of the collaborators who worked for years for the Western powers abandoned to their fate.
The simple fact that 300 former collaborators from the Spanish Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense arrived in Madrid yesterday brings to mind the images of desperation that arrived from the Kabul airport a year ago. Joe Biden’s decision to leave Afghanistan in a hurry greatly eroded the presidential figure little more than half a year after his inauguration, it caused his acceptance ratings to drop and led to a significant part of the public opinion in the United States being reminded of the military defeat in Vietnam and the hasty and chaotic evacuation of Saigon. Since then, the feeling prevails that what was done, according to the United States, avoided from the beginning the consequences that it was going to have and how many victims it would add. The only thing that was really taken into account in Washington was the need to get out of the hornet’s nest as soon as possible.
This made possible a rapid occupation of the springs of power by the Taliban, the consolidation of its pact with the majority of local warlords and the prompt surrender of the resistance in the north of the country. Y today it is impossible to correct the effects of the mess a year ago, when it was even said that, once the power of the jihadists was established, it would be possible to reach some compromises with them, including the safeguarding of the essential rights exercised by women for two decades. None of this has been possible, the conditions of the Afghans have visibly deteriorated, the rulers of Kabul have once again manifested themselves as a group alien to the most elementary conventions of the status quo and have isolated their country as much as it was until 2001. Those who see in today’s Afghanistan the image of a great collective failure.