Afghanistan has fallen.
Almost 20 years after September 11th, Taliban has blitzkrieged through Afghanistan taking province after province after the United States withdrew their remaining troops.
The US and NATO invaded the impoverished mountainous country in 2001 to root out the extremist jihadist group that had sheltered al-Qaida.
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President Joe Biden announced in April that he planned to withdraw all 3,000 US service members in Afghanistan by August 1rst.
Numbering some 350,000 Afghanistan’s army and police forces were supposed to be powerful enough to take on and stop Taliban. Biden himself had expressed his confidence in the military and told reporters that “there’s going to be no circumstance where you are going to see people being lifted off the roof of the US Embassy in Afghanistan.”
Though the Afghan military had years of training and millions of dollars and weaponry injected into it, more than $83 billion since 2002 according to The Washington Post, the Afghani troops didn’t even put up a fight.
In less than a week, Taliban fighters conquered one province after another and took control of tons of US weaponry including drones and even helicopters.
Taliban of 2001 is not Taliban of 2021.
And though 3,000 American troops have left the central Asian country, some 5,000 troops were sent to help evacuate US personnel as the jihadist group conquered their way to Kabul.
It’s not the first time that a military has left a country after occupying it, and not the first time for the US that just needs to remember the fall of Saigon in 1975. Even the pictures of the evacuation of the embassies are frighteningly similar.
Half a world away, Israel has had similar experiences in withdrawing from occupied territory.
Though it hasn’t invaded and occupied a country thousands of kilometers away, Israel has two military withdrawals from lands it occupied-Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.
In both instances, the vacuum left allowed terror groups to cement their presence and balloon into what the IDF now calls terror armies.
Israel occupied the coastal enclave in 1967 following the Six-Day War and in the years until Israel disengaged countless civilians and troops were killed in terror attacks by Palestinian terrorists.
Ordered by then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and carried out by Maj.-Gen. (res.) Gershon HaCohen, the Gaza disengagement saw the evacuation of 8,500 Israeli civilians and soldiers and the evacuation of 21 Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip in August 2005.
Less than six months later elections were held across Gaza and the West Bank. They were won by Hamas, elevating the movement’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, to the Palestinian Authority’s premiership.
The elections caused a rift between Hamas and Fatah which led to an eventual split between the two the following year and the consolidation of power in the Gaza Strip by Hamas and the imposition of a naval and land blockade by Israel and Egypt that remains in place until today.
The disengagement not only bolstered support for Hamas, but it gave the terror group free rein to increase its rocket arsenal to threaten deep into Israel-not only the settlements around the enclave.
Though Hamas fired its first rocket as early as 2001, the near free flow of weapons like rocket-propelled grenades and sniper rifles from the Sinai and their newfound freedom to locally produce the rockets accelerated to a rate not seen before the disengagement.
Israel has gone to war with Hamas and the various terror groups numerous times since the disengagement and has had countless rounds of violence which have led to the deaths of both soldiers and civilians.
The latest round in May saw over 4,000 rockets and mortars fired into Israel and killed 11 civilians and one soldier.
That’s only Gaza.
Five years earlier, the IDF withdrew from south Lebanon 15 years after Israeli troops first crossed into the country in 1978 to root out Palestinian terrorists.
While the Israeli military withdrew from most of the country in 1985, it kept control of a 1,000 sq. km. security buffer zone 20 km. deep, in order to prevent terror attacks that had plagued the civilians of the North in the 70s and 80s.
But under intense public pressure, then Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barak made the decision that Israel would withdraw from the security belt. Current Defense Minister Benny Gantz was the one who shut the gate after all troops crossed back into Israel.
Twenty-one years later, Hezbollah has grown into one of the most powerful terror armies in the world with an arsenal of between 130,000-150,000 rockets and missiles aimed towards Israel. Its militants have fought in Syria and have trained militias in Iraq and Yemen. The group is also a central part of the Lebanese social and political frameworks, making it almost impossible to dislodge the group from Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure.
It is because of these two withdrawals that Israel is cautious about withdrawing from the West Bank where IDF troops continue to have a strong presence in order to prevent terror attacks and safeguard the Israeli settlers who have made it their home.
Israel is well aware that should it leave, the Palestinian Authority would disintegrate and that Hamas would take over power in the West Bank. The PA, though corrupt like the Afghan government, is still able to hold Hamas at bay. For now.
The IDF withdrawals from both Lebanon and Gaza sent a message to terror groups that there was a way to beat the Israeli army-not through military operations or by diplomacy, but by wearing them down until they withdrew.
And that’s exactly what Taliban has done. It has worn out the great and powerful US military. Just like it did to the British and the Russians.
Plus ça change….
