As soon as Kunduz fell, it was clear that the government in Afghanistan would fall and leaving the country the way the US and its allies did was a bad policy decision, American journalist, author and university professor, Peter Bergen, told N1, adding that terrorism today represents a bigger threat to Europe than to the US.

Leaving Afghanistan the way the allied countries did was a bad policy decision and now the Taliban appointed a hardline government which includes people who the UN described as leaders of the Al-Qaeda to the government.

Two days before Kabul would fall into the hands of the Taliban, Bergen told CNN that it is just a matter of days when this would happen. He explained how he came to such a conclusion.

“We don’t know what classified assessments were being given to the various leaders as the situation developed. We do know that the intelligence community in the United States, two weeks was estimating that the government could fall between 30 to 90 days, according to CNN’s report.

“As soon as I knew that Kunduz fell, I knew that probably this was over because the most important highway in the country was between Kabul and Kandahar,” he said, noting that those are the two largest and most important cities in the country and “Kunduz is about halfway between them.”

He explained that when the US said it is leaving Afghanistan, every other country also decided to leave because the US was providing security on the ground.

“So it’s really (Joe) Biden’s decision,2 he said, adding that the airlift was well executed, but just came late.

“It brought a lot of people out, 122,000, but a lot of people would stay. International Rescue Committee estimates that 300,000 people helped the Americans in some form, he said, but noted that there were many more Afghans who helped other NATO allies and “all those people face potential problems.”

“I think it was a bad policy decision. The Taliban have just appointed somebody the UN described as a leader of Al-Qaeda to be in the cabinet,” he said.

Terrorism is now a much bigger concern in Europe than in the United States, as there were many more Europeans than US citizens who went to join ISIS.

“Look what happened in the summer of 204 in Iraq, 6,000, 7,000 westerners went to get training in Iraq. Most of them were from Europe, very few from the United States. It is very hard to get there, the US is separated by two oceans. Look at the numbers of Germans and British and French, some of those people came back and carried out attacks,” he said.

“There were 40,000 foreign fighters who came to join ISIS. The biggest number came from Tunisia and Lybia. And these guys, if they come back to their home countries, they create a lot of problems,” he said.

As for the US, Bergen noted that those who committed attacks in the country were not carried out by people who went to Syria or Iraq. Those people self-radicalised because of the exciting stories that had been told on the internet about the caliphate. And we’re going to have a similar thing with the Taliban,” he said.

“There are differences between the ISIS caliphate and the Taliban emirate, but the similarities are much stronger than their differences,” he said.

See the full interview linked above.