WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 01st September, 2021) Afghanistan has the seeds for future growth and prosperity following the US military withdrawal, but the question remains whether the new leadership and the people see this future and whether foreign countries will work together to promote it, analysts told Sputnik.
The rushed US Air Force mass evacuation from Kabul Airport ended on Monday night with more than 100,000 people, the majority of whom were Afghans and their families who had worked with the Americans, flown out.
Afghan farmers will now be focusing on growing their one hugely lucrative cash crop, opium poppies for the production of heroin, of which they provided 90 percent of global supplies during the 20-year-long US occupation, military historian and strategist, retired US Army Col. Doug Macgregor said.
"Afghanistan will exploit its only cash crop - heroin," Macgregor said. "Afghanistan's neighbors will compete for influence as needed, but will otherwise leave Afghanistan to the Afghans."
The question remained open whether the Taliban (banned in Russia) would rule more wisely than they did before their expulsion in November 2001 by US forces backed by the Northern Alliance of tribes, retired CIA analyst and senior officer Phil Giraldi, a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), said.
"Afghanistan will likely revert to something like normal, though it will be interesting to see if the Taliban are like the Bourbons, having learned nothing and forgotten nothing during their 20 years out of power," Giraldi said.
Critics of the Biden administration were exaggerating the danger that the resurgent Taliban would now provide a base for Islamist terror groups such as al-Qaeda or the lslamic State, both of which are banned in Russia, Giraldi said.
"The terror threat is being hyped for political reasons but it is essentially faux, groups of troublemakers who are only capable of doing terrible things when someone else, preferably a greater power, is using them," Giraldi said.
America's adventure in Afghanistan started with a bang in the months following the 9'11 terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans in 2001, but it ended with a whimper, Giraldi observed.
"The only real question is what will its long sought end game do to the unfortunate [President Joe] Biden whose staff bungled an operation that should have been relatively straightforward?" he asked.
A widespread consensus now exists that ending 20 years of war and military occupation of Afghanistan constituted utter failure for the US-NATO alliance on all levels, former FBI analyst and Special Agent Coleen Rowley, a "Time" magazine whistleblower of the year, pointed out.
Twenty years occupation of Afghanistan and the expenditure of some $2 trillion had resulted in "failure to secure permanent military bases, failure to gain access to lithium and other natural resources in Afghanistan and failure to create an 'American style democracy' puppet state," Rowley said.
However, the future outlook for Afghans under Taliban rule was less clear, Rowley cautioned.
"I doubt things can be much worse than the prior 20 years there. The consequences of the US-NATO departure upon regional terrorism is also not easy to parse since there are already indications of the same old covert operation shenanigans on the part of the CIA," Rowley said.
The long history of the United States using al-Qaeda and now Islamic State-type jihadists as "tools" of its bigger global chessboard goals would undoubtedly run counter to reducing the threat of terrorism regardless of the United States' military departure, Rowley added.
