Rarely in recent history do the words of a top US military commander sting as quickly as they did with President Joe Biden, who declared during a press conference about five weeks ago that "there will be no circumstance in which you will see people being pulled (for evacuation) from the roof of the US embassy." in Afghanistan".
This is what US columnist David Sanger, the New York Times correspondent for the White House and National Security Affairs, sees in an analysis in the newspaper in which he said that Biden added, to deepen his predicament, that "the possibility of the Taliban taking over everything and taking control of the entire country is remote." Extremely".
But the world, and the writer’s words, watched live on television on Sunday, the scramble to evacuate American civilians and American embassy employees from Kabul, not from the roof of the American embassy, but from the landing platform next to the embassy building, the same scenes that Biden had asserted that it would not He spoke, and agreed with his aides that they should be avoided during their last meetings at the White House.
Sanger said, in the analysis entitled "Pictures of defeat that Biden wanted to avoid", that the collapse of the Afghan government at an astonishing speed, means that it is certain that the Taliban will take full control of Afghanistan by the commemoration of the attacks of September 11, 2001, just as it was before 20 years.
He pointed out that the US administration had failed to get translators and other Afghan civilians who helped US forces out of the country quickly enough, even though the US President had set last April the anniversary of the September 11 attacks as the date for the final US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The writer also pointed out that officials in the Biden administration believed they had plenty of time, estimated at 18 months or so, due to intelligence estimates that overestimated the capabilities of the Afghan army, whose units often disintegrated without a shot being fired.
He concluded that regardless of whether this judgment is fair or unfair, Biden will go down in history as the president who oversaw the last humiliating act of the American experience in Afghanistan.