The withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan is an inglorious moment

As America and its allies start to finally pull out of Afghanistan, they leave behind a job unfinished.

The invasion may not have been about “nation-building”. It was primarily designed to be a punitive exercise to wipe out the Taliban after the 9/11 attacks. But all that has been achieved is to leave the country in an even worse state than it was in 2001, with the Taliban poised to make a comeback.

It is an inglorious moment. Afghanistan may have been an unwinnable war, an expensive one ($1 trillion and counting) and one that cost more lives and took more time than most thought possible.

This long-standing attempt to secure Afghanistan is now going to be abandoned – although you could question whether it was ever to be completed. The British and others might have wanted to stay on, desperately trying to turn the Afghan military into a fighting force – but without the US, this would have been futile.

General Austin S Miller, the head of the US-led coalition in Afghanistan, said recently that he often gets asked about the local security forces and whether they can operate effectively in the absence of American help. His response? “My message has always been the same: they must be ready.”

There is much anxiety among the civilian population about what this new reality will bring. With good reason, already the Taliban is exerting its will and organising deadly reprisals against those it deems to be collaborators – translators and the like. If the cruel experience of the past is any guide, whole tranches of Afghan society will be victimised. The rights of women are certain to be repressed.

Was it inevitable? Perhaps not, but America overreached itself, in classical imperial fashion, by opening up another front in Iraq. Had the US-led coalition been more adept at intelligence gathering and adapting to the Taliban’s tactics, the invasion might conceivably have had more success. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan could have been pressured to do more.

The coalition might also have been better off operating a far smaller “police action”, rather than an old-fashioned mass invasion and ground war in impossible territory. Instead, the American-led forces went on to revive the blunders and the miseries experienced by the Russians and the British in previous attempts at subjugation on Afghan soil.

There seems little point in dressing up the colossal failure and waste of life – including estimates of more than 100,000 Afghan civilians. Following the withdrawal, the Taliban will have room to exploit the country and more innocent lives face being lost.

The Taliban melted into the countryside but never gave up its struggle, patiently waiting for the west to lose patience and leave.