20 years - and counting? The terrorist threat may pull us back into Afghanistan.

With the fall of “Saigon on the Khyber” – a geographically loose but otherwise accurate description – on Sunday, America’s “endless war” came to an end. Maybe.

The political calculus behind President Joe Biden’s decision to abandon Kabul is easy. For years, Democrats, especially progressive Democrats, have had little stomach for remaining in Afghanistan. 

When Biden took office, he had the perfect political opportunity to end America’s involvement. All Biden needed to do was abide by former President Donald Trump’s “peace treaty” with the Taliban and the war, at least America’s involvement in it, would come to an end. Biden has actually been more cautious as Trump’s deal required America to remove all of its troops from Afghanistan by May of this year.

Biden hoped to avert blame 

Biden calculated that, with Trump’s fingerprints all over the withdrawal, Republican opposition would be muted and by ending America’s military involvement on his watch, he would be a hero to many on both the left and the right even if things eventually went badly, which everyone knew they would. When something is everyone’s fault, it’s no one’s fault. Providing, of course, that the Afghan government had the decency to hold out long enough to allow the Biden administration plausible deniability for the Taliban’s eventual victory.

The national security calculation is less clear. Wars should not be fought because they are popular but because they are necessary. And America’s invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 wasn’t just about “America First.” It was about “Civilization First,” which is why at least 48 countries besides the United States had troops on the ground in Afghanistan at some point over the past two decades. 

It is easy to forget just what a cesspool Afghanistan was 20 years ago under the Taliban, who enforced the most radical version of Islamic law they could imagine. Women had no rights and girls were not allowed to attend school after the age of 10, but that was almost the least of it. The Taliban enforced gruesome punishments like amputation, beheading and stoning almost arbitrarily.

They banned cinema, television and many of the arts. They engaged in systematic massacres of civilians, practiced medieval scorched earth tactics and purposely destroyed ancient cultural artifacts.

Even the Iranians thought the Taliban were religious barbarians who gave Islam a bad name. 

If that were “all” that had been going on in Afghanistan, America would have continued to look the other way. But the Taliban made the fatal mistake of allowing Afghanistan to become a haven for like-minded folks who wanted to bring some of these same charming practices to other countries and to America in particular. After 9/11, it became abundantly clear that the rest of the world could no longer turn a blind eye, and that the Taliban had to go.

Thuan Le Elston: Fall of Kabul, fall of Saigon: Their horror was our horror. Anguished, we pray for a miracle

And while America and its allies failed to bring stability and peace to Afghanistan, they did largely succeed in the goal of preventing the country from acting as a safe space for international terrorists. From a national security perspective, that’s a win. Since 2015, America has managed to maintain what passes for stability in Afghanistan with about 10,000 in-country military personnel. 

That’s all over now. With the fall of Kabul, the Taliban are now in control of most of the country. If they revert to form, Afghanistan will soon become a refuge for terrorist organizations from al-Qaida to the Islamic State, each one looking to take revenge on America and its allies. Should that happen, we might have no choice but to go back to Afghanistan and do this all over again in a sort of endless war Groundhog Day.

Will the Taliban learn from the past?

But perhaps things will turn out better this time, for us if not for Afghanistan’s people. There has been a generational turnover, and the Taliban of 2021 are not the same as the Taliban of 2001. For example, in the pictures of the takeover of the Presidential Palace in Kabul, you can see several Taliban filming the event with their phones, something old-school Taliban would never have done and not just for technical reasons.

It could be that the new generation has a better understanding of the world and realizes that there are limits to impunity, and that foreign terrorists are likely to be nothing but trouble. Had the Taliban refused to allow Osama Bin Laden to use their country as a base for an attack on America, there’s every reason to believe that the Taliban would have spent the past two decades running Afghanistan.  

Brett Bruen: Ex-Obama adviser: Why Biden must fire his national security adviser for Afghanistan failure

"The Taliban” translates as “The Students." Let’s hope they have learned the lessons of the past 20 years. Because it looks like we have not.

Republican Chris Truax, an appellate lawyer in San Diego, is a member of Paste BN's Board of Contributors.