Afghanistan: American departure leaves a vacuum for terror

So it’s over. America’s longest war spanned two decades and four presidents. It cost $2 trillion but that seems like loose change in comparison to the human cost. Lives ended, lives changed, lives destroyed.All these years on, it is President Joe Biden’s self-declared personal quest to protect the lives of American service men and women that has driven his actions.The fiasco of the departure has cost more lives, but there remains a belief in the White House that this is the right course of action.

It may not have been a tidy departure but it is a departure all the same. Though the president’s ratings have fallen as the chaos unfolded, two-thirds of the American people still agree with him that Afghanistan is not a war that needs to be fought any more.The words Biden has spoken in the past weeks have an echo of the words he spoke as vice president when in 2011 he orchestrated America’s departure from Iraq.

There too he believed enough blood and treasure had been lost, that nation building was no longer America’s job.However the experience of Iraq should stand as warning. When America made its move from there, Islamic State exploited the vacuum left in its wake.

Their rise in Iraq and Syria so deadly that the United States was once more drawn back in.It’s only a few hours since the last US troops left Afghanistan but already the Taliban have filled that vacuum.

They talk of cooperation, of wanting international recognition, of a new found respect for rights but at heart they are still a terror group.Despite their promise not to facilitate other terror groups, within their land ISIS-K is growing. It’s potential for harm evident in the lives they have already taken. Al-Qaeda may be diminished but it is not destroyed.The echos in the departure from Iraq and Afghanistan are not just in Biden’s words.

His troops may have left Afghan soil but only the most optimistic could believe this forever war is really over.