Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal could have gone so differently

What the U.S. did is kind of buy into its own fiction that the Afghan government was somehow a sovereign actor and try to treat it as such. So how they sequenced the withdrawal was, “We’re going to have a deal with the Taliban, and one of the conditions of that is that the Taliban are going to have to talk to the Afghan government to come to a peace deal.”

But why would the Taliban talk to a government that’s not a sovereign entity, that has no real stake on the ground? The U.S. should’ve recognized that and used that leverage over the Afghan government to force the Afghan government and the Taliban to come to a deal before they withdrew. And I think, if they had done that — or, at least, if not come to a deal, come to some sort of mechanism that would’ve been better than what we see now — that could’ve also bought time for more orderly withdrawal, especially for all the Afghans who helped the U.S. and want to leave and things like amnesty measures [for people who worked with the U.S. or served in the Afghan government].

The important thing is: What could you salvage from the Afghan government, and have them be part of the new order? Because that would make [the Taliban’s government] even slightly more inclusive. The current order, the danger is, is not going to be inclusive at all, which is the other terrible outcome.