With a great deal of pragmatism and political realism, America finally admitted that its project in Afghanistan, launched by George W Bush in 2001, had failed. America decided to stop stubbornness and deal with the truth as it is on the ground, not as in Hillary Clinton's dreams of liberating Afghan women from backward heritage and social injustice and achieving gender equality. The Taliban remained the most prominent and representative force of the people in Afghanistan despite 20 years of occupation and foreign imposition of governments in that country. America has not succeeded in persuading the majority of Afghans to separate the modernization and civil state project from resistance to occupation and foreign influence. So America remained in the eyes of the majority of Afghans an occupying power, and everything that comes from it or through it is suspicious and rejected because in the end, it serves the occupation project. By this logic, the Taliban represents “authenticity” and “patriotism” as opposed to subordination and alienation. The intellectual and “cultural” goals of the American invasion were not achieved despite the huge American spending on social and educational programs and the NGO’s in post-2001 Afghanistan.

America, at last, acknowledged that the ideas of “enlightenment” and “nation building” with the aim of creating a new Afghanistan according to American specifications are nothing but illusions that swirled in the heads of George W Bush and the other fathers of the invasion project. These unrealistic goals must be sacrificed and totally abandoned if not in line with direct US strategic interests and political calculations. On the other hand, there are indications that the Taliban movement, in turn, conducted a self-review and reconsidered its position on the Arab "Mujahedeen" and realized the importance of distancing itself from their non-Afghan agendas.

It is quite clear that an agreement or an understanding has already been made between America and the Taliban through the long rounds of negotiations in Qatar that began in the days of Donald Trump in 2019 and continued until the Biden era. This alone explains the American "acceptance" of what happened in Afghanistan during the past few days, which resulted in America’s no.1 man in Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani (who held the rank of "President") panically running away, leaving the whole country to the Taliban. The main points in the US-Taliban understanding that could be concluded, are summarized as follows: A promise and pledge from the Taliban to prevent the return of al-Qaeda groups to Afghanistan and taking it as a headquarters to threaten America's interests, in exchange for giving the Taliban a free hand in Afghanistan without America's interference to prevent its control of the country after its withdrawal.

With this arrangement, America, regardless of the humiliating scenes of its allies surrendering and its embassy employees burning documents and US flags, achieves two main goals:

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The first is to end the costly US military and economic involvement in Afghanistan, which has no political horizon and no time limit. The second, and most important, is to turn Afghanistan in the long run into a place of concern and pressure on America’s enemies and opponents in the region, particularly Iran, Russia and to some extent India, who were never friends to the Taliban movement, which in turn considers them as historical adversaries and enemies. Perhaps America hopes to add China to them if the CIA would be able to exploit the issue of the Uyghurs and the Muslims of western China, neighboring Afghanistan.

And we should not forget that America’s relationship with the Taliban is very old indeed, and even goes back to before the establishment of the movement in its current form, when the US engaged with all its capabilities in the huge program to support the “Mujahedeen” in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the 80s of the last century, the “Mujahedeen” whom the Taliban inherited ideological and political “principles” with its Pashtu background and its Pakistani connections. Therefore what’s going on between the two parties can be considered as a kind of reconciliation between two old friends separated from each other by effect of time, conflicting interests and the interference of strangers!

America allowed Afghanistan to fall into the hands of the Taliban so quickly and with great ease, without interfering or doing anything. Now, in return, it expects and waits for the Taliban to return the greeting gesture with one of the same kind, or even better!