Was the US defeated, or did the Taliban win?

That the US's Afghanistan adventure would come to a certain end had in fact been clear long ago, not today. Whatever the goals of this adventure, which began in 2001, the price that had to be paid for these goals was going to grow heavier as time passed. This had begun to be seen very clearly right at the start of the affair. That is why the decision Biden made on withdrawing from Afghanistan is nothing but resorting, however late, to the realistic policy that turning back from whatever part of the loss is a gain.

This decision could in fact have been made by Trump before Biden, and by Obama before Trump, and all of them considered making it but did not dare. Because although every minute spent in Afghanistan was to the US's detriment, explaining this to the public would not be so easy. So many lies were told to the public on the way there, and the matter was made into such a national issue with such great perception engineering. Withdrawing from Afghanistan came to mean, in the US, virtually abandoning a piece of the homeland.

Meanwhile, the intensive perception production that demonized the Taliban has convinced US public opinion a great deal about the Afghan woman's need for US protection and salvation. That is why the most heavily covered subject in US public opinion regarding the US withdrawal is, even today, reduced to the question of what will happen to the Afghan woman. One would think that is the US public's greatest concern.

There is an interview from 2010 between Ahmed Mansour, the successful presenter of Al Jazeera's Bila Hudud program, and Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistani Intelligence. When you watch the interview, you see very clearly that the US's situation vis-a-vis Afghanistan made a defeat or withdrawal necessary. Each US soldier here costs it at least 1 million dollars. Let us not even touch on the investments it made in the army it tried to build here, or the money it spent on rebuilding the country. You can only ask why this withdrawal, whose form and nature were foreseen so clearly 11 years ago, was delayed by 11 years. It is clearly seen that since that day Afghanistan has been for the US nothing but an extremely luxurious adventure with great costs to its own people.

Does Biden's daring to do what the others did not dare show that Biden is braver than the others? In my opinion, this event has to do with Biden's age and with the state experience he has reached at a certain level. Most probably, thinking he would not have a second chance at the Presidency, Biden was able to make this decision comfortably, with the thought that he had nothing to lose. Biden has nothing to shy away from in bearing the political cost that turning back from an adventure in which his country would suffer more loss may bring. We can say that, despite all his craziness, he took a braver decision than Trump.

With this brave decision, which is hard to explain to his people, Biden also suffered a significant loss of prestige because his foresight about planning the withdrawal did not pan out. In the face of the Taliban's very rapid advance there was one thing he had trusted all along. He had calculated that an Afghan army of 300 thousand, which he had trained and equipped for 20 years and made into a modern institution, could resist as a counterweight against the Taliban, and he had shared this calculation with the public many times. He had calculated that this army would, at the very least, by preventing the Taliban from entering Kabul, form a counterweight against it in the negotiations that might take place. That is, the calculation was not that Afghanistan would be left entirely to the Taliban. But in the face of the terror or the wind the Taliban unleashed, the Afghan army handed Kabul over to it without firing a single bullet.

So much so that even the Taliban was not prepared for this. Indeed, negotiations were continuing, and the venue that had been decided on, one step before the last, for these negotiations was Kandahar. The reasoning was that Mullah Baradar could not go to Kabul but could go to Taliban-controlled Kandahar. At the end of the day the Taliban found itself in the center of Kabul.

As for the Taliban. A very striking comparison is being made about them in the Arab media. They were never children of a generation that watched Rambo films. That is, when they met the US military, they did not have in their heads beforehand the images and stories of the extraordinary heroism of the American soldier produced in Hollywood. They had taken no ideological narcotic that would require them to fear the US soldier. It was a real encounter. On their own land they fought a war of independence against the US, which they saw as an occupying power no different from earlier ones.

What those who label the Taliban terrorists should know is that they have no activities in any country other than Afghanistan. They resisted the occupation only on their own land. For that reason the label of terrorist could be pinned on them only by the occupiers.

Moreover, in 2001, when the occupiers came, they were a group that had been governing Afghanistan for at least 5 years. Their only tie to terrorism is that they did not hand over to the US Osama bin Laden, who had given the order for the 11 September attacks. And from their standpoint this was an entirely traditional, principled stance of not handing over to his enemy someone under their protection in their country.

Furthermore, there are those who, although they speak as if they were great experts on the Taliban, do not know the simplest fact and still describe them as Salafi. We have said it before. The Taliban is not a Salafi movement; it has a Hanafi-Maturidi understanding in the most traditional madrasa line possible. The Salafism we are familiar with in the Arab world is, from whichever side you look, an ideology formed in interaction with modernism.

The Taliban's understanding of Islam is not traditionalist but traditional, and let us underline this in particular. The structure carries to the present and applies a never-updated corpus of an unbroken madrasa tradition based on the Hanafi-Maturidi school. During the 20-year period in which it had to leave government, it did not stand idle, and it has probably genuinely felt the need to update at least some of this corpus.

At least the messages it has given show that it has made this update.