The World This Week: The Afghanistan Left Behind

An announcement from President Joe Biden this week has finally set in stone the deadline for pulling American troops out of Afghanistan—and a grim reality of the country they’ll be leaving behind was discussed on Friday’s The World This Week.

“[The Taliban] pledged that they would turn the last few months in a total nightmare, not just for U.S. troops but for Afghan citizens,” said The Daily Beast’s Noor Ibrahim. “And the US proposal for a power-sharing interim government hasn’t gone over well either, so the fact is that this does leave Afghanistan in a very vulnerable position.”

Paris-based journalist Catherine Field argued that while Joe Biden had no other option but to push the original May 1 withdrawal deadline to September, Afghanistan will certainly be facing a turbulent path in the months to come.

“He really couldn’t go forward,” she said. “Unfortunately what we’re going to be looking at a swathe of countries from Afghanistan, through Iraq, through to Syria, through to Libya that will just be in some sort of permanent state of unrest or civil war, and I think Afghanistan is heading through that road.”

According to World Politics Review's Judah Grunstein, the situation in Afghanistan signifies a blatant dismantlement of the goals the U.S. has pursued for the country’s future over the past couple of year.

“I think what we have a very obvious, clear definitive failure of this American vision of a remade Afghanistan that could be integrated in a regional economy that’s connected,” he said.

Watch the full show on France 24.

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