Kabul is the new Saigon. The pictures are the same, the situation is the same. Thousands of people wander through the city in fear and panic, wanting to get out of the country, hoping for a flight to freedom. The machines with which they can escape the chaos are not even there. The occupiers, however, are already crouching everywhere, in the streets, in the presidential palace, at the airport. They patrol the city, staring at arms. The Americans and their allies are at the mercy of the Taliban if they want to save anyone at all. This is the shameful end of a mission that was not only supposed to end Islamist terror, but also to bring democracy and human rights to Afghanistan. That leaves nothing.
The fact that the United States, the European Union and German politics are being overwhelmed by developments and have not expected how quickly the Taliban will seize power shows a blindness that affects the entire Western public. Everyone looked at Kabul, organizations concentrated on the capital and believed that there would be change. But there was no such thing in the rest of the country, as correspondents reported time and again. The Taliban were never gone, they were in power long before they took provincial capital after provincial capital. The Allied troops hunkered down, they did not control more than their military bases. They only provided apparent securityunder which the building of a civil society based on the western model could not succeed.
You could already feel that years ago when we were traveling with someone who has been involved in Afghanistan since the eighties. At the end of the 1990s, the retired colonel of the Bundeswehr, Reinhard Erös, went to northern Pakistan, where millions of Afghans had sought refuge from the Taliban's reign of terror. With his private organization Kinderhilfe Afghanistan, Erös built schools for boys and girls and medical aid facilities; there are now thirty of them. To travel through the eastern provinces of Afghanistan even with someone like him meant constantly being on guard, covering up, scouting, hooking the hook, staying in one place for no more than two hours, and - reassuring yourself with local authorities . These authorities are not provincial governors,but mayors, militia leaders and mullahs. The soldiers from the West, on the other hand, were the target of the Taliban's attacks, which increased year after year. No Afghan was safe around them.
One wonders how this could have remained hidden from the responsible politicians and why it has not long since penetrated the public that the "Operation Enduring Freedom", which began in autumn 2001 and which since 2015 has been given the cynical title of "Freedom's Sentinel" - has contained the terror of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, but is otherwise a single failure. It is shocking to see that visa formalities are at stake and that there are already warnings of a wave of refugees who would most like to be diverted to Turkey, while in Afghanistan thousands who believed in the promises of the West have campaigned for freedom and human rights, fear for their lives and fear the revenge of the Taliban. This is our thanks.
The pictures are alike. The defeat of the Americans in Vietnam in 1975, the withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan in 1989 and the withdrawal of the Allies now, which until recently was staged as orderly and should not officially end until August 31st. They refer to the devastating defeats of the English in the nineteenth century in the Hindu Kush, in which the British historian William Dalrymple recognizes a blueprint of the wars of our time: an apparently superior power marches in, believes in a quick victory and fails due to the resistance of the tribal warriors who are the Afghans to this day are.
Whereby “Operation Enduring Freedom” had a legitimate starting point with the fight against global Islamist terror. In this, too, we could be back at the beginning. “The procession began at thirteen thousand / someone came home from Afghanistan”, says Theodor Fontane's “Tragedy of Afghanistan”. Required reading since 1858.