HUGE TOLL: Nearly 2,000 US defence personnel, 70,000 Afghan security men and 47,000 civilians have died in the Afghan war since 2001

There is more brutality to the war in this poorest of the countries in terms of psychological scars of the young and old, and families and communities which were caught between the Taliban, the US-led International Security Assistance Force and the Afghan government. Against this background comes the decision of American President Joe Biden to bring home the remaining 2,500 American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan and make way for the return of the Taliban.

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in New York and Washington and the death of around 3,000 office-goers and rescue workers in the twin towers, the then United States President George W Bush rushed the mighty American commando forces, with NATO in tow, into the target-impoverished, Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

Initially, the Bush Administration asked the Pakistan interlocutors to persuade the Taliban, who had been in power in Afghanistan since 1996, to hand over the prime suspect of the terror attack, Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaida. The Taliban mulishly refused. And the American troops poured in.

There were warnings then that it would not be an easy war for the Americans in Afghanistan. Two other great powers before them — the British in the late 19th century and the Soviet Union in the 1980s — had failed in their attempts to control the country.

It seemed that the Americans had had the last laugh when the Taliban resistance collapsed. A lot many of the Taliban troops were captured along with Al Qaeda men. In violation of international law, these prisoners of war were transferred to Guantanamo Bay and other undisclosed centres of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) — the American spy organisation — in different parts of Europe and in some other places like Egypt.

American troops scoured the Tora-Bora mountains and caves there in search of Osama bin Laden, but they could find no trace of the man.

It was only a decade later that the American Navy Seals swooped on Osama’s hideout at Abbotabad in Pakistan, where he was found with his young wife and children on

May 2, 2011. Instead of being imprisoned and brought to trial, he was killed without ceremony and his body was thrown into the sea.

Perhaps, the Americans feared that he would spill the beans about his American connections in his war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. It is estimated that in the years between end-2001 and up till now, more than 2,000 US defence personnel, nearly 70,000 Afghan security men and about 47,000 Afghan civilians have died in the war.

The economic cost of the war is estimated to range between $800 and over $500 billion.

These are but statistics. There is more brutality to the war in this poorest of the countries in terms of psychological scars of the young and old, and families and communities which were caught between the Taliban, the US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the Afghan government.

Against this background comes the decision of American President Joe Biden to bring home the remaining 2,500 American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan and make way for the return of the Taliban.

In effect, America has lost the war against the Taliban in the same way that it had lost the war against the Vietcong in Vietnam.

Unsurprisingly, pundits in America and America-friendly pundits in India are literally skirting the issue of the return of the Taliban to the mainstream Afghan politics.

The America-supported democratically elected government of President Ashraf Ghani is tottering in the face of the imminent dominance of the Taliban. Despite the ostensible international conferences in Doha, Moscow and Istanbul among the stakeholders, which include Pakistan, China, Iran, the US, Russia — and not India — the Taliban had been insisting that the American forces must leave Afghanistan before the puritanical Islamist group accepted the terms of peace and participated in the established political system.

There is, however, no explicit guarantee that the Taliban will conform to the norms of the post-2001 democratic Afghanistan.

It became clear after the Taliban regime was dislodged in late 2001 that there could be no political stability in Afghanistan without the participation of the Taliban. The armed Islamist group had sustained a credible insurgency over the past two decades, threatening the national and provincial governments of democratic Afghanistan. It is the sustained insurgency of the Taliban that has forced the Americans to bring them to the negotiating table.

It is indeed a matter of speculation as to the role Pakistan played in nudging and propping up the Taliban. It is a known fact that the Taliban, when they ruled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, were amply supported by Pakistan, both diplomatically and materially.

The Americans were very much aware of the Pakistan-Taliban nexus.

There is general hostility towards Pakistan among the people of Afghanistan because they are aware that it is Pakistan that facilitated the Taliban’s repressive regime.

Pakistan, in its desperate search for strategic depth, wants a Pakistan-pliant regime in Kabul.

The reason for India’s opposition to the Taliban is the Islamist group’s Pakistan connection. That is why India's official stance over the last many years has been that there cannot be a distinction between good Taliban and bad Taliban, and that the Taliban are bad per se because of their ultra-Islamist tenor and their terrorising tactics against their own people.

Pakistan has been trying to convince India through the backchannels that India should not maintain a rigid stance towards the Taliban, and that New Delhi should see the change in the attitude of the Taliban. This was nearly a decade ago.

For two decades now, the Americans have tried to convince the world, including India, about the spectre of Islamic terrorism threatening the global order. It turns out that Islamic terrorism was only a pretext to unleash the American firepower in a post-Cold War world. Now that China has emerged as the new ideological adversary, the Americans are only too eager to turn their back on the spectre of Islamic terrorism because it was just a spectre all along, and it was the proverbial Frankenstein's creature created to unseat the Ba'ath governments of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Bashar Assad in Syria.

Saddam Hussein has gone, but Bashar Assad remains. And chaos reigns in the Iraq-Syria region, and the Americans have burnt their fingers with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

At least in the case of the Taliban, the Afghan Islamist group has no extra-territorial ambitions like the ISIS.