A Stanford University historian who specializes in central Asia explained how the Trump administration's deal with the Taliban resulted in its swift takeover of Afghanistan.
The agreement struck in February 2020 set a 14-month timetable for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops, along with allied and coalition forces, and the release of about 5,000 Taliban prisoners, and historian Robert Crews told CNN International that deal sowed the seeds of the chaos that's now unfolding.
"The fundamental flaw was beyond the vision of 2001, to follow [Donald] Trump's plan to respect the peace deal with the Taliban, which essentially created a roadmap toward a surrender, toward diminution of the status of the Afghan state that Washington essentially backed," Crews said, "that legitimized the Taliban and really gave them a roadmap to launch the offensive that they have pulled off so brilliantly in the last two weeks."
Crews agreed the 20-year war was littered with failures and misjudgments across multiple presidential administrations, but he said those efforts had turned Afghanistan into a much different country than the Taliban ruled over prior to the U.S. invasion.
"There is potential for Afghan society to push back against the Taliban once this initial shock is over, and once the Taliban figure out how they will attempt to implement in the 1990s," Crews said. "The Biden administration has painted us all, Afghans in particular, into a corner, where they have no good choices, and they find themselves at the mercy of this movement over which no one except Pakistan has substantive leverage over now."
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