The US operation in Afghanistan will officially end on August 31. This was announced by President Joe Biden on Thursday. “I’m not going to send another generation of Americans to war,” said Biden. The USA would continue to support the Afghan army with money and material in its fight against the radical Islamic Taliban and would have a diplomatic presence in the country. But the US military will no longer intervene in the fighting. “We’re ending America’s longest war,” said the president.
According to media reports, almost all American troops have already been withdrawn from Afghanistan. “By and large, the withdrawal is complete,” the magazine quoted as saying Politico a senior government official on Thursday. “It’s over.” Of the 2,500 or so men who were recently in the country, only about 600 soldiers from the marine infantry and army are left. Some of them are supposed to protect the US embassy in Kabul, the rest are reportedly stationed at the airport of the Afghan capital to secure the arrival and departure of American diplomats.
This marks the end of the longest military mission in history for the United States. American soldiers have fought in the Hindu Kush for almost 20 years since the terrorist group al-Qaeda planned to attack from Afghanistan on September 11, 2001. During these years 2,448 GIs have died there and more than 20,000 have been wounded. At times the US had up to 100,000 soldiers stationed in the country. The Pentagon spent $ 825 billion on the war. Together with the civilian aid that has flowed into the country, the cost of the war is well over two trillion dollars.
In 2001, the USA achieved its first war goal, the overthrow of the then ruling Taliban regime, which gave shelter to Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. The further plan to build a semi-stable democracy based on Western models in Afghanistan could only be partially implemented.
Biden wants to prevent a scenario like the one in South Vietnam in 1975
For the United States, it is now a matter of avoiding a scenario in Afghanistan like the one in South Vietnam in 1975. At that time, the government they supported collapsed in Saigon, and the last Americans fled in a panic in helicopters and left the country in the lurch. US President Joe Biden does not want to give this impression – hence the strong security force for the embassy. However, it remains to be seen whether that will be enough to prevent the fall of Kabul to the Taliban and the overthrow of the Afghan government. Biden said it was not inevitable that the Taliban should win. However, many Afghanistan experts take the opposite view.
In the past few months, the Taliban have massively expanded their influence. They exert influence or control over about half of the country. The US negotiated a withdrawal with the Islamists in Doha last year. So far, however, there has been no agreement between the Taliban and the Afghan government. The Islamists seem to want to sit out the trigger in order to be able to increase their pressure on Kabul once the Western protective power has withdrawn. The talks between the Afghan delegation and the Taliban in Doha are not progressing. On Wednesday and Thursday, however, Afghan politicians and representatives of the Taliban met in Tehran through Iranian mediation. Both sides agreed further talks to achieve the “transition from war to lasting peace” in Afghanistan.
The last Bundeswehr soldiers had already left the Mazar-i-Sharif base in northern Afghanistan last week. Afterwards a debate broke out in Germany about the Afghan employees of the Bundeswehr, police and German development workers. Many of the local workers are still in Afghanistan and fear for their lives due to the advance of the Taliban. You report high bureaucratic hurdles to get from Afghanistan to Germany. The federal government argues that it has already issued 2,400 visas for local staff and their relatives, and insists that former employees of the Bundeswehr or other German institutions must pay for the travel expenses themselves.
An initiative led by Marcus Grotian, who was a soldier in Afghanistan for the German armed forces, now wants to “collect donations to pay for flight tickets,” according to the chairman of the Afghan local staff sponsorship network Süddeutsche Zeitung said on Thursday. The security situation in Mazar-i-Sharif is so catastrophic that no more time should pass. The lives of the local workers who stayed behind were in massive danger. First of all, all remaining former employees of the Bundeswehr who so wished were to be brought to Kabul in order to take them out of the country from there on scheduled flights. If this is not enough, a machine should be chartered from private funds to bring the local staff to Germany, said Grotian.
US President Biden announced that he wanted to bring Afghan employees of the American army to safety. Visa issuance will be “increased dramatically,” he says. The US government has an eye on third countries to which the employees are to be brought in the coming weeks to wait for visas there. “We will stand by your side, just as you were by our side,” promised Biden to the local staff who remained behind.