WITHDRAWAL POSTPONED
The 20-year war in Afghanistan, the longest conflict involving US troops, was started under President George W Bush and furthered under President Barack Obama. Over 100,000 people were killed and about 3 million displaced, according to data from the nonpartisan Costs of War project at Brown University.
Biden pledged during his 2020 campaign to end “forever wars” and withdraw from Afghanistan, although he postponed the pullout to which Trump had agreed by three months until the end of August 2021. The US-backed Kabul government collapsed on Aug 15 as the Taliban were entering the city.
The disorganisation and chaos as the US left raised questions about Biden’s leadership, the quality of US intelligence and America’s commitment to human rights and thousands of Afghan citizens it had relied on.
An Islamic State suicide bomber on Aug 26, 2021, killed 13 US service members and 170 Afghans as they clustered outside a gate of the airport.
Thousands of American citizens, greencard holders, and Afghans who had applied for Special Immigration Visas were unable to leave on the largest US airlift on record.
Altogether, some 100,000 Americans, greencard holders and Afghans – many of whom were not vetted – were flown out before the US withdrawal ended just shy of the 20th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.
The Trump administration agreed in a February 2020 accord with the Taliban on the pullout of all US-led international forces by May 2021. The militants agreed to stop attacking American troops and hold peace talks with the Western-backed Kabul government.
In laying out the withdrawal chronology, the summary said that successive troop reductions ordered by Trump had left 2,500 US troops in Afghanistan when Biden took office in January 2021. The result was that the Taliban controlled or contested half the country, the summary said.
Faced with the choice of delaying the pullout or increasing the number of US forces and facing renewed Taliban attacks, Biden chose the former and ordered planning for the withdrawal and evacuation operation, the summary said.