The sudden collapse of the US-created government and army of Afghanistan, with resounding echoes of the communist victory in South Vietnam in 1975, is being blamed by centrist and right–wing journalists and politicians on President Joe Biden’s unwillingness to maintain a few thousand troops in Afghanistan in perpetuity. The speed with which the Afghan army collapsed came as a surprise to the Biden administration and to the Pentagon, both of which repeatedly predicted that the government could hold on against the Taliban for at least a year after the last US troops left.

We need to be careful not to ignore the realities of the Taliban and of the US invasion and twenty-year-long occupation. The Taliban’s success in defeating the United States means the reestablishment of a brutal, authoritarian, misogynist regime. We shouldn’t let the United States’ opposition to the Taliban and professed support for women’s rights and elections in Afghanistan obscure the destruction and death the American military inflicted on Afghan people. We should remember that today’s Taliban are descendants of the mujahideen that the United States armed and guided after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 — and that, until the September 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush administration was moving to reach an accommodation with the Taliban government of that era.

US military alliances and wars are the results of imperialist calculation, and we shouldn’t let the fact that America’s opponents are sometimes terrible regimes — and that, in the process of cementing control over other countries, the US government occasionally adopts policies that do some good — obscure the overriding reality that imperialism, whether that of the United States today or of Britain or other European powers in previous centuries, was and is evil. The most important question we need to ask about the Taliban victory is what effect it will have on America’s capacity to launch future imperialist wars or to intimidate other countries by means short of invasion.