“Every now and then, there are shifts in the world. These are moments that without hyperbole can be called game-changers. What we have been watching this last week in Afghanistan is most certainly one of these game-changing moments. Not since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union have we witnessed this big an alteration in the geopolitical landscape. These past seven days have seen the end of America as the world’s number one superpower and have left us in what now can be considered a Post-American Era.
I am not saying these words for shock power, nor am I in any way gloating. I am an Israeli with a deep love for the United States. There is no greater friend that my country has had in our 73 years of existence than the US, and there are many in America that I consider to be as close to me as family. That is why it is with great pain and sorrow that I write these words. But it needs to be said, and maybe it takes someone from the outside who can look at the situation objectively and who has access to news and media that isn’t driven by a party agenda.
What has taken place this last week in Afghanistan has shown the world that America under this present administration is, as one Chinese TV host put it, a “paper tiger”. It may look big and scary on the outside, but when an Islamist terrorist army came marching to Kabul, rather than standing up against it, the US military continued its pull out, abandoning its friends and allies and breaking its promises. Please understand that this is not a knock on the United States military. If US forces were allowed to give full vent to their power and skill, the Taliban would be reduced to smoldering ash heaps in hours. It is the finest, strongest military in the world. But even a small child can throw rocks at a great bear if the great bear is penned up in a cage.
What led to this situation? Not surprisingly, many fingers in Washington and in the press are pointing at the previous US president. But that is based on either ignorance or a willful distortion of the facts. It is true that the previous president did plan to pull troops out of Afghanistan, but it was going to be a measured withdrawal based on a deal that he had established between President Ashraf Ghani and the Taliban. Under the deal, Ghani would release 5000 prisoners to the Taliban. In return, the Taliban would not attack the Afghani forces or the US military. The American president threatened the Taliban mullah he was dealing with saying that if they broke the deal, he would hit them like they’d never been hit before. He even mentioned by name the village that the Mullah came from. Ghani, for his part, never liked the agreement that the 45th president brokered. He worked hard with this friends in the American Democrat Party to sabotage the deal. But, the pact was signed in Qatar in 2020, and for the next one-and-a-half years, no American soldier was lost due to the Taliban.