Let us hope Joe Biden does not repeat the mistakes of the past two decades over Afghanistan

Editorial: The US president’s language of a blood feud in the wake of the bombing in Kabul echoed that of George W Bush

( Brian Adcock)

President Joe Biden’s syntax was more disordered than usual at his White House news conference in which he responded to the loss of 13 US service personnel and more than 160 Afghans in the bombing at Kabul airport. A loss that now includes two British adults and the child of a third Briton.

So it was no surprise that attention focused on three short, clear sentences addressed by the president to Isis-K, the jihadist group in Afghanistan: “We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.” That echoed the language used by George W Bush after the attacks on the US that came out of a clear blue sky 20 years ago next month.

It is the language of the blood feud; the language that led the US and its allies into Afghanistan in the first place. It drew the US into a military conflict in a society or complex of societies that it did not understand. It was a conflict that proved unwinnable on the terms that quickly expanded after the initial intervention in 2001, namely to create a stable, approximately democratic, non-Taliban government.