“Is this going to be Biden’s Rwanda?”

Still, in the four months since Biden’s decision was announced, I have been surprised by the lack of concrete debate and discussion about what the real consequences are of the pullout. Why? It’s hard to say for sure. Political calculation by both parties is part of it, undoubtedly, as well as the all-too-pressing problem of too much else terrible going on, with American democracy in crisis and a horrible summer coronavirus surge. But events on the ground do not wait for Washington, and this is the week that the consequences have started to reveal themselves. So, the question must be, and is starting to be, asked: What will come next from this disaster?…

When I spoke on Thursday with experts who have decades of Afghan experience between them about the week’s events, they were contemplating even more apocalyptic scenarios for what may come. “Is this going to be Biden’s Rwanda?” asked one longtime acquaintance, whom I met in Kabul in the spring of 2002, full of determination to build a modern, functioning state out of the post-Taliban, post-9/11 rubble. Or, perhaps, “Al Qaeda/isis 3.0”? The possibilities, from large-scale human-rights atrocities to a new center for international jihadist terrorism, are bloodcurdling.

I mentioned the fear of an “Al Qaeda/isis 3.0” to Peter Bergen, the journalist and author who has just released “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” Bergen, who interviewed bin Laden in the nineteen-nineties in Afghanistan and whom I met there when I was sent by the Washington Post to cover the war in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, told me that he thought the catastrophe in Afghanistan was very similar to the isis blitzkrieg into Iraq that followed the U.S.’s 2011 withdrawal. “The movie is exactly the same movie,” he said. “It’s basically the isis playbook.” Whether and when the Taliban roll into Kabul, it’s already clear that we are looking at a renewed and violent civil war. In short, he added, “It’s a fucking mess.” Which, come to think of it, is a pretty fair epitaph for this whole sorry affair.