“The United States is pulling out all US personnel from its embassy in Kabul over the next 72 hours, including top officials, two sources familiar with the situation told CNN on Sunday,” reports CNN. “The withdrawal of embassy personnel marks a rapid acceleration of the process that had only been announced on Thursday, and is a situation that many State Department security officials expected would have to happen given the speed with which the Taliban has gained territory in Afghanistan in recent days.”
“The decision to pull diplomatic personnel out of the country comes as the Afghan government is in talks with the Taliban over the country’s future as the militant group surrounded Kabul on Sunday after taking control of every other major city across the country in just two weeks.”
“President Joe Biden announced on Saturday that he had authorized an additional direct deployment of 1,000 troops to Afghanistan ‘to make sure we can have an orderly and safe drawdown of US personnel and other allied personnel and an orderly and safe evacuation of Afghans who helped our troops during our mission and those at special risk from the Taliban advance.'”
Media pundits have been repeatedly asking the Administration why the Afghan forces failed to stand up to the Taliban after the US has spent so much money in Afghanistan. They fail to comprehend that money spent does not correlate to a will to fight among the people of Afghanistan. The Afghan leadership were never able to foster a sense of pride in the country, or a desire among the people to create an improved nation dedicated to the ideals of greater equality for women and religious minorities, and expanded public education and economic development. Without that kind of nationalist sentiment to bolster national pride, a country like Afghanistan has no means of countering a religious fundamentalist organization like the Taliban.
The experience in Afghanistan provides a lesson for Democrats in the United States who are trying to find ways to counter destructive reactionary political messaging within America’s rural communities, as the steady growth of Taliban control in Afghanistan largely mirrors the grip of Trumpist ideology in rural communities across the United States.