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

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.

So it was interesting that President Biden repeated the argument that the original 2001 mission had been accomplished, in that al-Qaeda had been prevented from using Afghanistan as a base. The trouble with promising to hunt down Isis-K is that it threatens to restart the cycle all over again, and the implication is that the US might go back into Afghanistan with military force in some form.

That is unlikely to happen. Terrible as the bombing at Kabul airport is – announcing the British deaths on Thursday the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, called it “a despicable attack ... by cowardly terrorists” – the prospect of a return looks remote. In the US public opinion does not demand that kind of retribution. After two decades of sustaining casualties in Afghanistan, the response to the loss of US marines and others is not the same as the shock of 9/11.

What is more, as Patrick Cockburn writes for The Independent today, the balance of forces in Afghanistan is different from that of 20 years ago. “Then, the Taliban needed an alliance with al-Qaeda, which provided it with money and fanatical fighters ... Today, the Taliban needs no such assistance.” Indeed, it is possible that Afghanistan’s new rulers will present themselves as the kind of authoritarians with whom the west can do business.

That was a repeated theme of President Biden’s news conference. “They’re not good guys, the Taliban. We’re not suggesting that at all. But they have keen interests,” he said. “No one trusts them. We’re just counting on their self-interest.”

So when the president suggested that the US would go after Isis-K “with force and precision at our time, at the place we choose, and a moment of our choosing”, it seemed unlikely that he meant putting US troops back on the ground in the country.

As the British forces complete evacuation operations, in the shadow of a tragic loss, there is little prospect that they will be back in combat. Boris Johnson has praised the “bravery of our armed services” during their mission and promised to “shift heaven and earth” to help those left behind, but the direction of travel appears set. British public opinion may have been more prepared to continue a military presence in Afghanistan, but that was always on the assumption that the US would be doing most of the work. There is little appetite among the British people to go it alone, and the news of British casualties will probably only strengthen public support for getting out.

President Biden has staked the early part of his presidency on seeing through his decision to pull out of Afghanistan. He said it would always be messy, although he admits that he did not foresee the Afghan army melting away so quickly; but he sounds like a leader who is prepared to pay a price to end a 20-year war.