One year ago in August marked the point of Biden’s presidency when things started going off the rails.
Some could argue it happened well before then, like the day he took office, but it was Biden’s insistence on a swift and messy pullout from Afghanistan sending his approval rating on a downward slide that never looked back.
Despite empty promises of the “new and improved” Taliban being more open and lenient on things like girls attending school, the lies never panned out. No one ever believed that to begin with, and it didn’t take long for the country to unravel and basic human rights to be repealed at breakneck speed.
One year later and Afghan women continue to plead for help and acknowledgment under a brutal regime intent on imposing Islamic law in a country that spent the last two decades liberated:
On Aug. 15, 2021, two weeks before the U.S. military was to complete its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban entered Kabul and captured the capital as the culmination of a weeklong offensive in which the hardline Islamist movement rapidly seized control over most of the country, sometimes with barely a fight. A few days later, at the first press conference since returning to power, a Taliban spokesman promised that women in Afghanistan would be allowed to work and study “but within the framework of Islam.”
Since then, the Taliban has banned women from having jobs amid an already tenuous economy, which collapsed almost overnight after the world cut off funding to Afghanistan last year. According to a study released by United Nations Development Programme, an estimated 97% of Afghanistan’s population could be living below the poverty line by mid-2022, making the $1,000 visa fee to leave the country virtually impossible to secure. The Taliban has also banned women from traveling alone without a male guardian, which has confined many to their homes.
The Taliban’s requirement for women to wear full body coverings in public was also reintroduced, while the ban on girls attending secondary schools has resulted in 46% of young women not being in education, according to a report by Save the Children.
The economy is in shambles and young girls are being traded like commodities in many cases to put food on the table. It’s devolved from a functioning yet flawed civil society to an uncivil and oppressive country once again as it had been under previous Taliban rule.
Hearkening back to August of 2021 and it became clear within hours that the Biden administration severely underestimated how quickly the Taliban would take control of the country. Biden was quoted saying they had weeks and months before Kabul would fall, instead it went down in hours.
Rather than stay in Washington and face the music this year, President Biden escaped on a two-week vacation away from the White House, something that critics have pointed out was clearly timed to try and erase the failure of Afghanistan from the public memory:
Republicans seized on Mr. Biden spending the anniversary enjoying sun and fun in South Carolina, blasting him as an out-of-touch politician.
“Biden‘s latest vacation is as poorly planned and tone-deaf as his withdrawal from Afghanistan. It’s in America’s best interest for Biden to go on a permanent vacation and retire,” said Will O’Grady, a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
While Mr. Biden was mum, the Taliban celebrated Monday. Hundreds of supporters marched into a central square in Kabul, just feet from where the U.S Embassy once stood. They waved flags and chanted “God is great,” jubilantly hailing their return to power after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001.
It was at this point, a year ago, that Americans got to see a real Joe Biden, one where the lives of soldiers and the lives of U.S. nationals and friendly Afghans hoping to flee certain death seemed inconsequential to the goal of exiting the country as quickly as possible.
The end result was disastrous as Biden pressed forward to meet some self-imposed deadlines:
The Afghanistan withdrawal was riddled with errors and miscalculations, including leaving behind more than 100 Americans and scores of Afghanistan allies. A few days later, 13 U.S service members lost their lives amid the withdrawal in a suspected Islamic State suicide bombing at Kabul airport.
The rushed withdrawal was carried out to meet Mr. Biden’s August 31, 2021, deadline to completely remove the U.S. from Afghanistan, ending a 20-year occupation that cost $1 trillion.
As a flashback to when the bodies of the 13 service members killed in the Kabul airport attack were received in the United States, Biden had to check his watch during the ceremony:
That was the beginning of unveiling Biden’s true personality. A personality that lacked empathy unless it benefitted him politically. A personality that feigns understanding with average Americans until his policies start running them over.
The failed Afghanistan pullout, and the thousands still left in the country unable to escape Taliban rule, is Joe Biden’s legacy.
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