Taliban victory after Joe Biden’s Afghanistan retreat poses a danger to us all

While Donald Trump was accused of making the world a more dangerous and unstable place, Joe Biden has actually done it, writes James Morrow.

The world has just become a far more dangerous place – and not just for the millions of Afghans now subject to rule by the Taliban.

Thanks to the Biden administration’s humiliating retreat from Afghanistan, every tin-horn dictator and wannabe superpower around the world now believes (and not without reason) that America is a paper tiger.

It did not have to be this way.

US President Joe Biden. Picture: Mandel Ngan/AFP

President Joe Biden’s own generals told him not to pull out of Afghanistan so precipitously, telling him to instead keep a presence on the ground while working through peace talks.

But no, he insisted on getting out by September 11, 2021, the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and kept reassuring the world that everything would be fine.

As if to show how lightly the administration took the danger, as recently as last June the US embassy in Kabul was tweeting about its support for “Pride Month”, oblivious to the fact that the city was about to be overrun by pre-medieval theocrats armed with abandoned Western weaponry.

Afghans crowd at the tarmac of the Kabul airport in an effort to flee the country. Picture: AFP

Members of the British Army disembark from an RAF Voyager aircraft after landing in Kabul, Afghanistan to assist in evacuating British nationals. Picture: Leading Hand Ben Shread / MOD / AFP

In July, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said that “we are staying, our embassy is staying, our programs are staying.”

The great, sad irony is that while Donald Trump was alleged to have made the world a more dangerous and unstable place, Joe Biden has actually done it.

While every president since George W. Bush shares in the responsibility for what has happened in Afghanistan, under Biden the United States has suffered a complete humiliation and provoked a massive humanitarian and diplomatic catastrophe.

Former US President Donald Trump. Picture: Eric Baradat/AFP

It’s Saigon, 1975, all over again – right down to the airport flooded with locals desperate to get out and helicopters evacuating embassy staff to safety.

And the West’s enemies in Moscow and Beijing are taking notice.

Back in the 1970s, the concern was the Soviets. Four years later after Saigon they would launch their own invasion of Afghanistan at the same time they were projecting power further into Latin America.

Today, China is the worry. And the chances that Beijing, emboldened by the Biden administration’s lack of resolve, will make a play for Taiwan – or perhaps initially some outlying islands as if to say “what are you going to do about it?” – have just gone up dramatically.

So too is the concern that Moscow, which has been drawn into a closer alliance with Beijing, might provoke its own crisis to further distract the Biden administration.

But, hey, at least we don’t have a president who’s sending out mean tweets any more.