Contact with the West has influenced Afghanistan - but will it be enough?

President Bush and particularly Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were adamant that we would not get involved in nation building in Afghanistan - and then we did.

President Obama ran declaring that we had neglected Afghanistan when we became embroiled in Iraq. Obama, cautious by nature, was - in the words of his Vice President Joe Biden - "jammed" by the military and convinced to authorize a surge of U.S. forces, but at the same time announced that there was a timetable for their withdrawal.

President Trump's balance sheet foreign policy concluded the billions we were pouring into Afghanistan was a bad deal. His administration opened a channel with the Taliban to extricate the U.S. from its longest war. The deal he cut (and we don't know everything that was promised) said the U.S. would withdraw all its forces by last May and in exchange the Taliban would promise to not target those U.S. forces and to engage in negotiations in Doha with representatives of the elected Afghan government in Kabul. Few believed the Taliban were serious about talking.

As was pointed out, the Americans had the watches, but the Taliban had the time.

President Biden decided long ago that America's counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan had been fulfilled and that there was no reason to keep U.S. and NATO forces there. The military urged him to keep a few thousand troops there to act as a spine for the Afghan National Army, but Biden's mind was made up long ago.

If he had argued that the Taliban had not lived up to the bargain they struck with Trump and decided not to withdraw U.S. troops, the Taliban would have most certainly ramped up attacks on U.S. targets and more American body bags would have created its own particular political calculus.

Even Pentagon officials who urged that some U.S. troops stay argued that there was no military solution as long as the Taliban could melt back into Pakistan, regroup, resupply, and gather recruits from the madrassas, or Islamic seminaries. However, the Taliban clearly have shown that they believed there was a military solution.

In Carter Malkasian's recent history of the Afghan war, he argues that the Taliban's great strength was their unity. Even Afghans who opposed the fundamentalists' medieval and brutal philosophy, judged that the Taliban were good Afghans because they were devout Muslims and worked to expel the Americans as their forefathers had expelled the British and the Soviets. Those things are central to the Afghan character. This is in stark contrast to the now-defunct Afghan government, which was riven with tribal divisions, corruption, and incompetence. The Taliban probably can't govern any better, but fear will keep the majority in line.

The domestic politics of all this in America is already ugly. America did a lot of good in Afghanistan and there are many young Afghans who are educated and have been exposed to democratic ideas. They are seeds for a future. There was a vibrant media - which will now be shut down - but will probably continue to exist in cyberspace. Afghan women, in particular, fear the return of the Taliban with good reason. The Taliban has made noises about understanding that 20 years of contact with America and the West has made Afghanistan a different country. Perhaps that is just more wishful thinking - like hoping the Afghan National Army would stand up.

The majority of American people agreed with Presidents Trump and Biden that it was time to end America's longest war. If the Taliban return to the brutal methods used during their five-year rule in the 1990s, will those attitudes change? More importantly, what will Afghans do? Will some 39 million Afghans resist the 80,000 to 100,000 Taliban fighters that "control" that vast country?

• Keith Peterson, of Lake Barrington, served 29 years as a press and cultural officer for the United States Information Agency and Department of State. He was chief editorial writer of the Daily Herald 1984-86.