RASC News Agency: On the fourth anniversary of the devastating suicide bombing at Kabul airport’s “Abbey Gate” and the complete withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan, former U.S. President Donald Trump signed a commemorative proclamation. That attack, which occurred amid what Trump repeatedly calls the “catastrophic” U.S. departure from Afghanistan, claimed the lives of more than a hundred Afghanistani civilians and 13 American service members. Trump marked the occasion by meeting with the families of the slain U.S. soldiers, using the platform to once again accuse President Joe Biden of “cruelty and negligence.” In his address, Trump branded the Biden administration’s withdrawal “the most shameful display of American foreign policy in history,” insisting that “such a disaster should never have happened.” He has consistently wielded the Kabul evacuation as one of Biden’s greatest weaknesses throughout the 2024 election campaign.
Yet, behind the political finger-pointing lies a broader consensus: multiple inquiries over the past four years into the circumstances surrounding the U.S. exit and the Taliban’s subsequent seizure of power in Afghanistan have revealed that Washington and the wider international community had long resolved to leave Afghanistan behind effectively ceding the nation to the Taliban. Political analysts argue that the seeds of withdrawal were sown well before Biden assumed office. During Trump’s first term, in 2018, he launched direct negotiations with the Taliban in Doha, appointing Zalmay Khalilzad widely seen as sympathetic to the group’s interests as Washington’s special envoy. These talks culminated in the 2020 Doha Agreement, a deal that bestowed political legitimacy on the Taliban and paved the way for the eventual departure of American troops.
Critics maintain that by signing the Doha Agreement, the United States effectively surrendered Afghanistan’s sovereignty to the Taliban. In practice, Washington abandoned the very government it had helped establish two decades earlier in Bonn, a government built with the backing of the United States and the United Nations, only to watch it collapse under the weight of political expediency. While Trump has sought to portray the Kabul evacuation as a political weapon against Biden, the reality remains stark: Trump, Biden, and the U.S. Congress collectively failed the people of Afghanistan. Their shared decisions motivated more by domestic political calculations than by long-term responsibility delivered millions of Afghanistani citizens into the hands of a group still recognized internationally as extremist, regressive, and deeply hostile to fundamental rights.
In the four years since, Afghanistan has been reduced to a nation trapped under the iron grip of Taliban rule. Once again, the group has proven itself incapable of governance beyond brute force and coercion, dismantling two decades of progress in education, press freedom, women’s rights, and civic life. According to human rights defenders, the decision by Washington and its allies to legitimize and empower the Taliban did not bring peace; it condemned Afghanistan to systemic repression, deepening poverty, and the wholesale destruction of the basic rights of its citizens. The tragedy of the Abbey Gate attack and the chaotic withdrawal was not simply a moment of mismanagement, but the culmination of years of policy failures in Washington. For Afghanistanis, however, the consequences have been far graver: an entire nation forced back into the shadows by a regime that thrives on fear, denies women and girls even the most basic freedoms, and continues to isolate Afghanistan from the modern world.
