PASSING THE POISONED CHALICE:

For the first time in two decades, and arguably for the first time since the late 1970s, there is a semblance of calm in Afghanistan's countryside. The U.S. troop withdrawal last August, ending Washington's 20-year misadventure in the country, has ushered in a period when airstrikes, IEDs, and Taliban-orchestrated bombings are no longer daily facts of life. Afghans who haven't seen their relatives for years are now able to travel the roads without worrying about getting menaced by Taliban gunmen or fleeced by corrupt Afghan army troops.

At the same time, Afghanistan is at a perilous moment in its history. The 11-day collapse of the Western-backed Afghan government and the dissolution of the Afghan security forces (paid, equipped, and trained courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer at a cost of $90 billion) has not only exposed the fecklessness of what was the American-constructed political system in Kabul, but yielded an imminent humanitarian catastrophe. The Taliban have learned that governing a weak, poor, and fractious nation of 40 million people is a lot more difficult than waging an insurgency against a kleptocratic government dependent on foreigners. [...]

The Biden administration, successfully extracting U.S. forces from an unwinnable civil war despite the objections of senior U.S. military leadership, recognizes the gravity of Afghanistan's humanitarian situation. 

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