Today marks the third anniversary of the last day of U.S. presence in Afghanistan, August 30, 2021, and no matter how much the White House and the media shy away from the really bad news, the reality is that a radical Islamist Afghanistan as it stands today, poses grave danger to the United States and the West.

The (prideful) post-withdrawal comment of presidential candidate Kamala Harris that she “was the last person in the room” with President Biden and her recent embrace of the Administration’s withdrawal strategy as “courageous and right” will haunt her in the campaign ahead. When the question of which candidate can best protect America as President is raised, she will need to defend a historic failure.

The current anarchic state of the world can be traced back to the failures in Afghanistan. 

Both the Trump and Biden-Harris administrations share the blame for the debacle that ensued. Still, the Biden-Harris administration, which reversed much of Trump’s other policies, stuck with his pledge to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan and then proceeded to exacerbate matters by botching the execution. 

The complete, precipitous, and incompetent withdrawal of U.S. forces deserted an allied nation of 40 million people. We left millions of women and girls to suffer ISIS-like repression of their humanity. An American administration consigned our friends and allies to unimaginable levels of poverty, repression, and despair.

If December 7, 1941, the day that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, is a “day that will live in infamy,” then one should consider August 30, 2021, the last day of U.S. presence in Afghanistan, a “day that will live in ignominy.” The difference is that on December 7, 1941, we suffered a surprise attack from an enemy, Japan. On August 30, 2021, we gratuitously surrendered an entire allied nation to a minority of barbarous radicals. Sadly, it never had to happen. The Biden-Harris administration had the choice between stalemate and surrender—and they chose to surrender.

America surrendered Afghanistan to a violent totalitarian enemy who is gearing up to cause us more harm. These fighters are armed with $7 billion of modern American-made equipment. A new Taliban arms market supplies American-made equipment to terrorist groups from Central Asia to Kashmir to Gaza, and Lord knows where else.

We are in a kind of Third World War with a Eurasian axis. Shooting wars in Europe and the Middle East accompany a new cold war with China.  By surrendering in Afghanistan, we encouraged America’s adversaries to question our reliability as an ally and our willingness to deter. As a result, Ukraine and Israel were attacked.

Regarding U.S. competition with China and Iran, we surrendered strategic military bases that greatly strengthened America’s position to deter those adversaries. Particularly, Bagram, just north of Kabul, is a short flight from Xinjiang province and Shindand near Herat, which is seventy miles from the Iranian border. The Northern Distribution Center in Mazar-i-Sharif was an impregnable fortress, airbase, and logistical hub in the middle of northern Afghanistan. As a result of total withdrawal, we have lost all on-the-ground human intelligence and military capabilities in what is now a rogue, terrorism-harboring nation.

It is obvious that along with the loss of those two airbases and the northern distribution hub comes an incalculable loss of deterrence against those two powerful and now collaborating adversaries.

But perhaps the greatest effect of no “boots (or ears) on the ground” is the large-scale emergence of sophisticated terrorist organization training bases. The relationship between Al Qaeda and the Taliban has always been close. Al Qaeda installations have been established in ten out of thirty-four Afghan provinces. They have proved resilient and are now operating with the support of the powerful Haqqani Network, which plays a lead role in the Taliban government. They are setting themselves up once again as a major non-state actor, but this time with the support of a Taliban state armed to the teeth.

According to former acting CIA Director Mike Morell and Harvard professor Graham Allison, ISIS-K in Afghanistan is actively seeking to harm the American homeland. Since we are not on the ground there, as we were prior to withdrawal, preventing such an action, as we have done in the past, is far more difficult.

General Joseph Dunford, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned back in 2018 that without pressure from the U.S. and its allies, Al Qaeda would “reconstitute” and pose further threats to American interests. Well, we are there now, in 2024, three years after withdrawal, with only problematic “over-the-horizon” capabilities to influence the festering terrorism situation in Afghanistan.

ISIS-K operates out of bases in Afghanistan, and while they are supposed competitors with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, they use the vastness of Afghanistan’s territory to reconstitute and threaten violence against Afghanistan’s Shia minority and the wider world. 

Other terrorist organizations, too numerous to mention, have found safe haven in Afghanistan and are willing buyers of the surplus of modern weaponry left behind. By leaving Afghanistan the way we did, we have not only enabled Russia’s war on Ukraine and Iran’s proxy war on Israel, but we have also enabled a whole new cohort of terrorist organizations with utter contempt for Western civilization and its most fundamental values.

Finally, in a guilt-ridden attempt to curb the abject poverty and starvation for which we are largely responsible, the United States has delivered some $2.6 billion in taxpayer-funded aid to Afghanistan through the UN. The assistance passes through the Taliban-controlled Central Bank, so we have no firm idea how much actually gets through to the people in need and how much is skimmed off by Taliban officials.

The size and scope of the calamity is unimaginable. The Afghanistan story is far from over.

Former U.S. Rep. Don Ritter is the President and CEO Emeritus of the Afghan American Chamber of Commerce. He has forty years of continuous experience with Afghanistan, starting with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. He has published numerous articles on Afghanistan; the last one was published on the second anniversary of America’s withdrawal.

Image: Ryanzo W. Perez / Shutterstock.com.