Terry Glavin: 25 years after 9/11, the West has given up

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The 25th anniversary of the terrorist atrocities of September 11, 2001 is rendering all the memorials, tributes, reminiscences, chat-show panel discussions and public ceremonies that you might expect.

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At their best, Americans recall their unity and resolve in the face of what was an unprecedented attack from the skies, straight out of a science-fiction movie. Canadians will offer an accounting of themselves as plucky allies. The generosity of the people of Gander, Nfld., who opened their homes to thousands of stranded airline passengers, has just been awarded its own Heritage Minute from Historica Canada.

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But as a world-historical event, September 11 is easily matched by the grotesque scenes from Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, 20 years later. Tens of thousands of terrified Afghans had swarmed the airport in desperation and panic in the days leading up to Aug. 30, 2021. That was the day the last U.S. troops left Afghanistan. It was the day U.S. president Joe Biden squandered the $995-billion investment the U.S. Treasury had sunk into a multinational project to rebuild Afghanistan after decades of Russian occupation, famine, proxy-war barbarism and Taliban rule.

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That project was well underway: A new generation of Afghans was just graduating from university, women’s rights were respected as well as anywhere in the Muslim world and a fledgling Afghan democracy was just beginning to claw its way out from under the older generation’s cronyism and corruption.

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To be fair, Biden’s withdrawal was an American bipartisan consensus. From his earliest days as vice-president, in 2009, Biden was of the same mind as Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defence under George W. Bush: Like Rumsfeld, Biden sneered at the notion of what he called “nation-building” in Afghanistan.

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The Rumsfeld-Biden cynicism gradually seeped into Barack Obama’s Oval Office, but it wasn’t fully rewarded until President Donald Trump’s first term. In February, 2020, Trump’s negotiators cemented a pact with the Taliban that forced Afghans to “reconcile” with Mullah Omar’s sadistic Pakistani-backed insurgent emirate.

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Against its will, the Afghan government was required to integrate the Taliban into its administration. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani was strongarmed into releasing thousands of Taliban commanders and fighters from prison, without regard to war crimes proceedings by the International Criminal Court.

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The Doha arrangements permitted the Taliban to intensify their attacks on Afghan forces, so long as U.S. troops, drawn down to 2,500 soldiers, were left unmolested. The pact also stipulated that the U.S. would ensure the removal of all NATO troops from the country.

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As president, Biden was pleased to honour the agreement even though the Taliban had violated its terms, notably its assurance that it would no longer shelter terrorist organizations like al-Qaida. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan left billions of dollars worth of U.S. military hardware in Taliban hands, and it wasn’t until July 21, 2022 that the senior al-Qaida cleric and 9-11 coordinator Ayman al-Zawahiri was eliminated by a Hellfire missile as he stood on the balcony of his upscale apartment in downtown Kabul.