The US administration has justified the withdrawal from Afghanistan by saying that the United States should not fight a civil war in another country. That war should be fought, they think, by the people themselves, not by a foreign power. Both Democrats and Republicans share this view, as apparently does the general public. Critics of the withdrawal object to the way the withdrawal was implemented, not to the withdrawal itself. They blast the failure of the government to evacuate Americans and others before withdrawal. But, all seem to agree, withdrawing is the right decision. The underlying idea seems to be that Afghanistan is a sovereign country, and that once the Al Qaeda terrorist threat was neutralized, the United States had no business remaining there. Afghan political problems should be solved by Afghans.

I think this is the wrong way to look at this tragedy. I will state my dissent in the starkest possible form: Afghanistan has no business being a sovereign state. If the only possible outcome of the political process is the rule of the Taliban, then the country is not a legitimate state, because the Taliban, one of the worst regimes of recent times, is not entitled to rule. I hope I don’t need to document what we can expect of Taliban rule. The Taliban will kill, torture, and terrorize everyone, women in particular. Saying that these atrocities are an incident of sovereignty or self-determination is too grotesque to be taken seriously. This is true even if the Taliban allows all Americans and others to safely evacuate, and even if Afghanistan (improbably) does not allow anti-Western terrorists to operate in its territory. For the focus is not us but them, the Afghans, who will be killed, tortured, and terrorized by these monsters.

What solution then? If the so-called international community is serious about human rights and human security, then it should send an international force, defeat the Taliban, and set up an international administration to rule the country in accordance with minimal international standards, as long as necessary, forever if need be.  The mistake of the US intervention is not that the United States was disrespectful of Afghan sovereignty. The mistake is that the United States was too respectful of Afghan sovereignty.