S?bastien Roblin: The Afghanistan airport explosion happened ...

Indeed, if there was ever a chance for a more orderly U.S. exit — and to be clear, that’s far from certain — one of Biden’s biggest mistakes might have been to adhere to the deal former President Donald Trump made with the Taliban rather than set his own terms and timeline.We need only rewind to February 2020, when the Trump administration signed the Doha agreement with the Taliban, in which the U.S. pledged to withdraw all U.S. and NATO forces by May 1, 2021, in exchange for the Taliban’s ceasing attacks on U.S. forces, forsaking ties to groups like Al Qaeda and agreeing to hold peace negotiations with the Afghan government, which then still controlled most of the country even though it was increasingly losing ground to the Taliban.The Doha negotiations didn’t include the Afghan government — supposedly our partners in fighting the Taliban and terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, the group better known as ISIS — and the deal that resulted was widely recognized as having thrown our allies under the bus, as the Taliban were free to carry on fighting the Afghan army as long as they didn’t attack U.S. forces.The Taliban proceeded to do just that, going on the offensive in March 2020 while repeatedly spurning or walking out on the Afghan government’s attempts to negotiate a power-sharing agreement. Setting hard deadlines was important to Trump — and then Biden for domestic political reasons, of course — but the looming certainty of American withdrawal made it easy for the Taliban to bribe demoralized Afghan commanders into surrendering without a fight, facilitating the Taliban’s rapid advance.Trump also bears responsibility for having made it harder to evacuate tens of thousands of Afghans and their families who risked their lives working with the U.S. According to an aide to former Vice President Mike Pence, Trump’s immigration team went out of its way to impede the application process of America’s Afghan allies seeking asylum and to reduce the number allowed to come in via Special Immigrant Visas, which allow Afghans who risked their lives to support U.S. forces to immigrate.