Just last month during a White House press conference on July 8, U.S. President Joe Biden rejected the notion of a Taliban takeover being “inevitable.” But on August 15, the Taliban seized control of the country’s capital Kabul as the government collapsed and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. The rapid takeover of the country by the Taliban caught the Biden administration off-guard and set in motion a chaotic evacuation in which some 2,500 American troops attempted to secure the Kabul airport. On August 16, during a UN Security Council Briefing on Afghanistan, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Linda-Thomas Greenfield urged nations that “together, we must do everything we can to help Afghanistan, to help Afghans who wish to leave and seek refuge. We in the international community stand ready to assist them.
On August 24, the Group of Seven agreed on conditions for recognizing and dealing with a future Taliban-led Afghan government, but President Biden refused to accede to the appeals of G7 leaders to extend the August 31 U.S. withdrawal date to allow more time for evacuations. Two days later, over 100 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members were killed in a suicide attack carried out by the ISIS-K, the Afghan affiliate of the Islamic State, at the Kabul airport. President Biden denounced the attack, vowing, “To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this: We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.”
Going forward, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a press briefing on August 25 remarked, “If a future government upholds the basic rights of the Afghan people, if it makes good on its commitments to ensure that Afghanistan cannot be used as a launching pad for terrorist attacks directed against us and our allies and partners, and in the first instance, if it makes good on its commitments to allow people who want to leave Afghanistan to leave, that’s a government we can work with. If it doesn’t, we will make sure that we use every appropriate tool at our disposal to isolate that government, and as I said before, Afghanistan will be a pariah.”
In this Policy Alert, we examine the rising powers’ reactions to the Taliban taking power in Afghanistan as the U.S. leaves and how they view the future.
Read the Policy Alert here.
