From a humanitarian perspective, despite the terrible optics, our withdrawal from Afghanistan has turned out much better than the Biden administration hoped. 

Our failure to see this is a result of our national humiliation about losing a war and the focus of the media on the chaos at the airport.

We decided the war was ultimately unwinnable and it wasn’t worth wasting more American lives. The Biden administration hoped the Afghan army could hold out for five months to two years, allowing us to clear out before the inevitable collapse and take over.

But the Afghans made the same calculations that we did: Why fight and die in a war when your side is ultimately going to lose? As a result the war ended with a few hundred hard-liners dying in a few days, rather than tens of thousands with the wholesale destruction of cities and infrastructure.

Instead of applauding the relatively bloodless, inevitable turnover to the Taliban, we are outraged by the Afghan’s unwillingness to fight. We are shown endless loops of video of panicking crowds on the tarmac and we are horrified to hear of seven people dying in stampedes and falling off the wheels of airplanes.

Extricating ourselves from a lost war is going to be messy, but compared to all the other possible scenarios, nothing really bad has happened so far. 

The evacuation is slow and messy, but people are getting out. The Taliban, thus far, have been operating with unusual restraint for a conquering army, even tolerating some street protests without the anticipated massacres.

Our focus now should be on using our economic power to encourage the more pragmatic leaders of the Taliban to establish a stable government with rights for women (Pakistan would be an appropriate Islamic model).

Bob Landry
PORT TOWNSEND