Who can blame them? The FBI barely made a case of Hilary Clinton’s lost cache of emails and an at-home secret server, and while federal prosecutors are investigating Hunter Biden for potential tax fraud (to say nothing of the shenanigans documented on Hunter’s infamous laptop), no one has yet seen fit to raid the First Son’s home.Įven more remarkable than the raid itself are the reports that Biden was not aware of it before it happened. Since then, prominent Republicans have accused the administration of parallel systems of justice, drawing comparisons with Third World countries. That went out the window last Monday, when Donald Trump’s residence was raided by the FBI less than 100 days from the midterms elections - allegedly over violations of an obscure record-keeping statute. More from this author Buffalo and the myth of racist AmericaĪt home, for instance, Biden took office promising to reunite a polarised nation. What we have seen over the past year has been nothing other than chaos disguised as policymaking. Instead, I have come to see the Afghanistan debacle as something more alarming: the result of a complete lack of strategy, or even the basic contours of a plan. You come back from errors, you reset and correct course. A small US force would have been more than enough to keep the Taliban out of total power.įrom today’s perspective, however, it is no longer possible to view Biden’s withdrawal and the chaos that has ensued as a strategic error, however grave. Even before the 2020 peace deal, US casualties in Afghanistan had been extremely low for years, with fatalities averaging in the low double digits since 2015. Yes, perhaps Afghanistan was a very long way from becoming a proper democracy, but it would have been relatively inexpensive to keep a small force of a few thousand stationed there for a few more years, a fraction of the 100,000 troops stationed there in 2010–11. In that withdrawal speech, Biden argued that “the real choice” was “between leaving or escalating”.
We should welcome the killing of al-Zawahiri, of course, but his being found in Kabul gives the lie to Biden’s justification for the Afghanistan withdrawal. But the reasonable conclusion is that the two groups are still comfortably in bed with one another, and that al-Qaeda is once more using Afghanistan as a staging ground for its nefarious activities. No doubt the truth about the current relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda will come out in due course. More from this author Our universities need a revolution
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