Alwaght- Retired US Army General David Petraeus has described the outcome of the US war on Afghanistan as “catastrophic”.
The former US commander in Afghanistan as well as CIA director told an American TV host who asked him if the result of the war was a defeat for the US that the situation underway in the region was "heartbreaking and tragic."
"This is an enormous national security setback and it is on the verge of getting much worse unless we decide to take really significant action," Press TV quoted him as saying.
Petraeus said he had anticipated the "psychological collapse" of the Kabul government after the US withdrawal of troops prompting the removal of NATO troops along with thousands of contractors who had maintained the Afghan Air Force which gave the government special forces a military advantage over the fighters.
“If we communicate effectively with the Taliban that they need to halt what they are doing or we will bring the might of the US military down upon them, we can stop this,” he said.
The voices coming out from the West unanimously agree that the war end was not what the US hoped to see, signaling that the US-led Western camp lost the Afghanistan war after 20 years of military campaign there.
The NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg described the Sunday takeover of Afghanistan by Taliban a "tragedy." But he, like the US president defended the Western mission in the war-weary country and blamed the government in Kabul for the collapse.
"Ultimately, the Afghan political leadership failed to stand up to the Taliban and to achieve the peaceful solution that Afghans desperately wanted," he said. "This failure of the Afghan leadership led to the tragedy we are witnessing today."
On Monday Biden in an address defended the American withdrawal, saying that he would never regret the move.
In remarks that seemed ironic to many, Biden said all the objectives in Afghanistan have been met and it was time to pull out.
Taliban took over the power in Afghanistan over the weekend as they seized the presidential palace in the capital Kabul hours After the US ally President Ashraf Ghani fled the country with "cash-filled" suitcases.
The push to seize the whole country did not meet mentionable resistance from the country’s army which Washington says spend over $90 billion on to train and equip.
Who lost the war?
The day of the collapse of the government was dramatic, bearing all hallmarks of a defeat. But whose defeat? Ghani, a US ally in power since 2014, fled Kabul as the Taliban fighters with simple arms like AK-47 assault rifles seized the power from a government about which Washington bragged for two decades as an epitome of its assistance to Afghanistan state and government building process.
The Afghan army that in the Western media was painted as strong because of the NATO partnership collapsed overnight, with many of its troops ended up fleeing or surrendering.
The US troops at the Kabul airport in the last hours of evacuation of their personnel shot and killed Afghans, some of whom were their employees and translators, who struggled to embark on the transportation aircraft to be shipped out of the country.
The US embassy's personnel evacuation was a disgrace story, with many saying that the helicopter taking the embassy staff from the rooftop echoed the scene of evacuation from Vietnam in 1975.
This was the raw picture of the last day of the US presence in Afghanistan which ended in a catastrophe. So, does the US look anything like a victorious war wager as Biden tried to pose?
