It speaks volumes about the world today that a US president was more worried about the Taliban looking weak than about his western allies. Britain, France and Germany asked Joe Biden to continue evacuating civilians from Kabul past his self-imposed deadline of 31 August. But the US rejected these requests. Mr Biden wanted to end the chaotic TV scenes from Afghanistan that hurt his domestic poll ratings. But he also accepted that Kabul’s new rulers could not afford to look weak in front of their rival Isis, which is looking for an opportunity to embarrass its Taliban peer.
The west’s airlift will therefore be over by next Tuesday. It is the Afghan people who will pay the highest price for the west’s defeated ambitions for their country. They now face living under Taliban rule for a second time. There is no guarantee that a grinding civil war is over. The scale of the west’s failure is not just that the world’s biggest economies will almost certainly fail to evacuate all those who were employed by its armies and diplomats. It is that we have let down a generation of urban Afghans, especially women, who grew up believing that their lives would be better than their parents’. » | Editorial | Tuesday, August 24, 2021
