The withdrawal

US President Joe Biden wants the world to believe that the hasty withdrawal of the US troops doesn’t mean that the country lost the two-decade-long Afghan war. The US president has conveniently put the entire blame for the fall of Kabul on Ashraf Ghani. He added that the country has achieved its goals in Afghanistan, and that it wasn’t there for ‘nation building’. One would like to ask him a simple question: if that was the case, what have the American forces been doing in Afghanistan for 20 years?

The US spent trillions of dollars on the Afghan war; it also took interest in the training of the Afghan army. However, in the end, the US-trained army didn’t put up a fight against the Taliban. America’s disastrous interventions have also caused great misery in Iraq, Libya and Syria. It is time Americans paid attention to their flawed policies.

Akbar Jan Marwat

Islamabad