Taliban-ruled Afghanistan still in tatters on 3rd anniv. of US pullout
By Mehdi Ebrahim
Staff writer
The withdrawal of US troops from crisis-ridden Afghanistan on August 30, 2021 after more than two decades of devastating American occupation and the commencement of the Taliban rule brought an abundance of hope, not to say chimera, to the Afghan men, women and children. However, as the clock ticked by, things started to take a different tack.
Almost three years ago, the news hit the headlines so shockingly that the Afghans came to believe they had been thoroughly extricated from the manacles of modern colonialism whose tentacles stretched all the way from the Oval Office to the heart of Kabul.
Upon withdrawal, ordered by then US President Joe Biden, the American occupation forces left a legacy of destruction, destitute, famine, starvation and misery, deteriorating the already-precarious humanitarian situation across the war-ravaged country.
Nearly 50,000 Afghan men, women and children lost their lives in the 20-year war, in addition to tens of thousands of casualties among civilians, the Afghan military and national police, insurgents and others, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University.
The abrupt pullout was accompanied by the Taliban military offensive overrunning the Afghan provinces one after the other and the eventual seizure of the capital, which caused the central government to collapse and President Ashraf Ghani to flee the country.
Page 7