President Biden, a little more than two years ago today:
We will continue to support the Afghan people through diplomacy, international influence, and humanitarian aid. We’ll continue to push for regional diplomacy and engagement to prevent violence and instability. We’ll continue to speak out for basic rights of the Afghan people, especially women and girls, as we speak out for women and girls all around the globe. And I’ve been clear that human rights will be the center of our foreign policy.
Biden has never even bothered to nominate an ambassador to Afghanistan, although in October 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that Thomas West, who had served on Biden’s team when he was vice president, would be the Department’s special representative for Afghanistan.
Two years later, it is fair to ask whether that promised diplomatic push amounted to much. The U.S. Embassy in Kabul suspended operations on August 31, 2021. The current chargé d’affaires is Karen Decker, who was the deputy chief of mission of the U.S. embassy in Kabul from September 2018 to September 2020. The U.S. mission operates out of Doha, about 1,100 miles away.
A little more than two years ago today, then–White House press secretary Jen Psaki insisted, “We have enormous leverage over the Taliban, including access to the global marketplace.”
On the social-media site formerly known as Twitter, the U.S. embassy in Kabul has celebrated Women’s Equality Day and urged everyone to #EmbraceEquity.
As the New York Times summarized, the Taliban are not embracing equity.
In that sense, the Taliban have met expectations. The country’s extremist rulers, who seized power from an American-backed government of 20 years, have carried out revenge killings, torture and abductions, according to international observers. They have also imposed the world’s most radical gender policies, denying education and employment to millions of Afghan women and girls — even shutting down beauty parlors.
On Aug. 14, a group of United Nations officials issued a report saying the Taliban had engaged in “a continuous, systematic and shocking rescinding of a multitude of human rights, including the rights to education, work, and freedoms of expression, assembly and association.”
Americans had good reason to doubt the administration’s contention that it had a great deal of leverage over the Taliban; those brutal religious extremists were never that worried about access to the global marketplace. Their primary goal was enacting their strict, harsh, and inhumane rule over every square inch of Afghan territory, and they have largely succeeded, unhindered.
Much of what this administration says each day is meant to just get through the news cycle. They often bet that the vast majority of the American people will forget about the foreign-policy crisis of the moment. And quite often, that bet pays off.