As US forces were preparing to quit Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, in what turned into a chaotic and humiliating retreat before the conquering Taliban, President Biden made a number of assertions. It was “highly unlikely” the Taliban would be “overrunning everything and owning the whole country”, he said, just weeks before they overran everything and took ownership of the country. The US had achieved its objective of ensuring that “terrorism is not emanating from that part of the world”, he claimed, even as it was abandoning the country to the group that had harboured the perpetrators of 9/11.
And then there was this vow: that even if all else went wrong and somehow a nation run by Islamist fanatics did again become the
