Lucinda Creighton: Abandoning the Afghan people is a monumental own goal by Biden

The US president’s moral trapeze act is wholly dishonest, and leaving Afghanistan in a fragile and destabilised state will have repercussions far beyond that country’s borders

American forces in Afghanistan: ‘It is the manner of the withdrawal and the attempt to rewrite history that is frustrating’

In 2003, as chairman of the US Senate’s foreign relations committee, Joe Biden commented on the political situation in Afghanistan. “The alternative to nation-building is chaos,” he said. “A chaos that churns out bloodthirsty war lords, drug traffickers and terrorists.”

Now that his administration has decided to abandon the concept of nation building in Afghanistan, Biden’s words have turned out to be prophetic. The Taliban has taken control of Kabul, and its friends in al-Qaeda ...