Opinion | Post Afghanistan exit, US must confront the bitter truths of its global ‘war on terror’

The messy withdrawal, capped by a bomb attack at Kabul airport that killed dozens, is a sorry end to 20 years of America’s war in Afghanistan

A commission should be set up to bring to light the reasons for this debacle, as happened following the 9/11 attacks

Reading Time:4 minutes

Published: 1:00am, 4 Sep 2021

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus the king of Ephyra is condemned by the gods to painstakingly push a huge boulder up a hill only to have it roll down once he reached the top. To add to his misfortune, he was doomed to this laborious task for eternity.

The run-up to the 20th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks has a tragic Sisyphean tinge to it. On August 26, bomb attacks outside Kabul airport killed more than 100 people, including 13 US military personnel. Many more were injured.

The Islamic State Khorasan (Isis-K) claimed responsibility for this cold-blooded act of murder, even as it was condemned by the Taliban. US President Joe Biden asserted sorrowfully that the perpetrators would be “hunted” down.

Against this bloody backdrop, the final contingent of American troops left Kabul on August 31, as agreed, thereby bringing to a close the US-led global “war on terror” that had begun in October 2001. The Taliban, then in power in Kabul, had given shelter to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and the US ousted them after a swift and short military operation.

Al-Qaeda was scattered, bin Laden went into hiding and it was presumed by the US – wrongly – that the terrorist threat posed by the Taliban had ended. In one of the biggest policy blunders made by the Bush-led White House at the time, the Pentagon was directed to shift its operations from Afghanistan to Iraq.

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