WASHINGTON: The United States ends it almost 20 years of military presence in Afghanistan on Tuesday, two days after a drone strike inadvertently killed 10 members of a family waiting for evacuation to America.

This was the US military’s second drone strike this weekend in response to a suicide bombing that killed 13 US service members and over 170 Afghans on Aug 26.

Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters on Monday that they were “not in a position to dispute” reports of civilian casualties, but “we are (still) assessing and we are investigating”. US military officials, he said, were coordinating their investigation with their former adversary, the Taliban.

The misguided strike sums up the confusion and the dilemma that the United States had to face constantly since October 2021, when its forces first entered Kabul, dethroned the Taliban and captured the country.

They ended up with a country where the majority welcomed the change and yet they had enough enemies in every corner to be always on guard. They had allies they could trust and allies they could not trust.

And even among those they trusted, some were so corrupt that their association with the Americans had a negative impact on ordinary Afghans. They also built a 300,000-strong Afghan army that ran away instead of fighting the Taliban when the militants invaded Kabul earlier this month.

Then there were incidents like Sunday’s drone strike that killed civilians, weakening US efforts to present Washington as a benevolent partner.

The hopeless situation forced the Trump administration to sign a deal with the Taliban, pledging to withdraw all American troops in return for a peaceful exit. The agreement, signed in February 2020, is now being implemented by their adversaries in the Biden administration. But the Aug 26 terrorist attacks at the Kabul airport — and now this drone strike — ended the hopes for a peaceful exit.

Now, President Joe Biden is facing calls from Republicans, and some Democrats, to extend the military mission into September — a demand he is reluctant to accept.

Instead, the White House seems focused on finishing the US mission without any further casualties, amidst warnings that groups like ISIS-K are planning more attacks.

“We should brace ourselves for more chaos and disorder,” Nathan Sales, a former Trump official, told The Hill newspaper.

“It’s very difficult to do an evacuation at the same time you’re doing a military retrograde, and that’s essentially the situation we’re in now.” The Hill covers the US Congress and major political events.

“The final days of the US military presence in Afghanistan have served as a microcosm of some of the major US policy failures over the last 20 years: Poorly executed policies, public messaging that falls flat, and actions that have terrible costs for Afghan civilians,” said Michael Kugelman, an analyst of South Asian affairs at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars.

In its latest report on the Afghan war, the office of the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) pointed out that Washington spent 20 years and $145 billion trying to rebuild Afghanistan, its security forces, civilian government institutions, economy, and civil society.

The Pentagon also spent $837 billion on warfighting, during which 2,443 American troops and 1,144 allied troops were killed and 20,666 US troops injured.

Afghans faced an even greater toll. At least 66,000 Afghan troops and more than 48,000 Afghan civilians have been killed, and at least 75,000 have been injured since 2001. SIGAR described both as “likely significant underestimations.”

“The extraordinary costs were meant to serve a purpose” but Washington was never clear what that purpose was, SIGAR added.

Published in Dawn, August 31st, 2021