And many around the world are wondering whether they could rely on the United States to fulfill long-standing security commitments stretching from Europe to East Asia. […]
”People are bewildered that after two decades of this big, high-tech power intervening, they are withdrawing and effectively handing the country back to the people we went in to defeat,” Ellwood said. ”This is the irony. How can you say America is back when we’re being defeated by an insurgency armed with no more than [rocket-propelled grenades], land mines and AK-47s?”
As much as its military capabilities, the United States’ decades-old role as a defender of democracies and freedoms is again in jeopardy, said Rory Stewart, who was Britain’s minister for international development in the Conservative government of Theresa May. ”The Western democracy that seemed to be the inspiration for the world, the beacon for the world, is turning its back,” Stewart said. […]
Washington ”bears an unavoidable responsibility for the current situation in Afghanistan,” Col. Wu Qian, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of National Defense, said earlier this month. ”It cannot leave and shed the burden on regional countries.” […]
But the manner and implementation of the withdrawal has left allies feeling betrayed, said Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook, director of the German Council on Foreign Relations. Germany’s government, which withdrew its troops in June and is evacuating its embassy, has refrained from overt criticism of the U.S. withdrawal. […]
The decade-long Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which ended in 1989, is widely remembered as a failure, one that leaves Russia in no mood to reengage too closely with Afghanistan, he said.
But at least, Lukyanov noted, the government left behind by the Soviets survived for three years after the withdrawal of Red Army forces.
”We believe our failure was big, but it seems the Americans achieved an even bigger failure,” he said. Läs artikel