In 2021, President Joe Biden kneecapped the Afghan National Army by chopping off all logistical assistance to it, even as he withdrew US forces from every single location in Afghanistan. What followed was a human rights disaster, for the country was once again taken over by the Taliban, much the same way as had happened under the watch of President Clinton in 1996. Within days of the Biden pullout, all the lives and treasure that the US had expended in Afghanistan since 2001 went as waste into the ditch. Within Afghanistan, those who had believed in the reliability of the US as a security partner were condemned by the surrender of President Biden to the Taliban. Many faced execution, imprisonment and other horrors.
To this day, there are US citizens in Afghanistan who are missing, several of whom are most probably dead. Those who survive would be going through a living hell for believing in heresies such as equal rights for women, or the right to freely practice a faith or a profession. Even the Bagram Air Base was surrendered, and is now considered to be in the effective occupation of the PRC Security Services. Were National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to look into the backgrounds of several of those US citizens who advised the White House that fleeing from Afghanistan was a good idea, he may discover that the same people have in recent days been asking the US President to meet the demands of the protestors upending campuses across the country, including that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) be kneecapped through withdrawal of US support in the way that the Afghan National Army had been three years ago.
There is no question that what is being witnessed in Gaza is a tragedy of unimaginable dimensions. Destruction and death are inescapably following in the wake of efforts by the IDF to eliminate the military capability of Hamas. In like manner, military campaigns conducted by the US in the past in Afghanistan and Iraq involved immense loss of civilian lives. The same human tragedy is unfortunately taking place in Gaza ever since the IDF launched its operation to eliminate the military wing of Hamas. This is an objective that ought to have been met in 2005, or by 2007 at the latest, once the manner of rule of Hamas over the people of Gaza became clear. Successive Israeli regimes ignored the danger to Israel that was gaining in strength before their very eyes, even as they sought to belittle and weaken the Palestinian Authority (PA), the only lawful authority throughout the territory of the State of Palestine. Expecting the PA to be a lapdog of the Israeli government, and to humiliate it because of its refusal to accept such a lowly status, ensured that those Palestinians committed to violence and even to the elimination of Israel steadily gained traction over those who believed in living peacefully side by side with the Jewish state.
Almost all the students on US campuses who have joined in the protests against Israel have done so out of horror at the images being shown of women and children perishing during the fighting in Gaza. However, outsiders who have embedded themselves with genuine protestors have an agenda, and this is to get President Biden to repeat his 2021 Afghanistan blunder in Israel. In the past, during the 1960s in particular, there were numerous student protests within US campuses. These were because of issues such as the Vietnam War, or apartheid in South Africa. The US was military committed at the time to fighting the Vietnam War and drafting the youth for the same, while even in the 1960s, apartheid-style policies against African-Americans were being practised in some US states. Gaza is a different proposition.
An extremist group took control of the enclave in 2005, and remained unchallenged until, on 7 October 2023, it carried out a terror attack on Israel that made a strong kinetic response by the IDF unavoidable. The sooner the campaign by the IDF against the military wing of Hamas concludes, the better. In the meantime, the White House needs to avoid throwing IDF under the bus following the Afghanistan precedent. Those in favour of 2021 have also been in favour of the US cutting off all assistance to the IDF. Such a commonality of views comes as no surprise to those who have mapped the manner in which democracies have been suffused by their foes in ways designed to weaken their domestic resilience and international credibility.