How the U.S. Made the Afghan Collapse Inevitable

The administration said it was prepared for any contingency. It clearly wasn’t.

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When Joe Biden came into office, we were told that the “adults are back in charge” because he immediately set to work undoing as much of Donald Trump’s legacy as he could.

“The new president in his first week issued more than three dozen executive actions on a wide range of issues,” reported U.S. News & World Report. “And virtually all of them reverse or stop actions taken by Donald Trump.”

From immigration to health care, the adults began cleaning up the mess left for them. Biden rejoined the Paris climate accord and made plans to restore the Iran nuclear deal.

But on Afghanistan, the president’s hands were tied. On Saturday and again on Monday, Biden insisted that he “inherited” Trump’s deal and his hands were tied. But, wanting it both ways, he also said he agreed with the policy that was forced on him.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    The America First “realists” say that the fact that Afghanistan collapsed means they were right that we should have left. If we pulled our troops out of Korea, North Korea would invade and South Korea would collapse in a similar fashion to what we are seeing in Afghanistan. Does that mean we need to stop fighting the “endless” Korean War?

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    Jason Gibson

    ...and the children shall lead....

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  3. Chase Choate

    This was an utter calamity that easily could have been avoided. I for one wanted a small troop presence to stay… anywhere from 2,500 to 10,000 would have been fine with me. But if we wanted to leave, we EASILY could have done better than what we did.

    The need to refocus our efforts on China & Russia, not Afghanistan makes little sense to me. Afghanistan is right next to both countries. I see no reason from a strategy standpoint to abandon the area. Leaving it for those countries, India or Pakistan to take charge in the power vacuum we created.

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    Dsypul

    I don't think children could do a worse job...

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  5. Dennis Trask

    Our political leaders and our citizenry at large have failed miserably to think and communicate about hard truths. The last 4 winning presidential candidates offered the candy of leaving Afghanistan. We are paying a price now. The Afghan people are paying a price in blood.

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  6. jmk789

    I think the issue that most "realists" have is less that the US went to war in Afghanistan in the first place, but more that the US stayed there while moving on to launch a war of choice in Iraq and concurrently expanding the war aims in Afghanistan. The expansion of the war from "Get Bin Ladin and remove the Taliban regime" to the incoherent and extremely ambitious "eliminate all Taliban (except right across the border in Pakistan), put together a multinational army, do reconstruction and political reform and human rights, and bring in a bunch of different militaries from NATO to save US money" was the issue. While the focus was on Iraq, the US actually disbanded the Afghan tribal militias that had helped win the war (and would at least fight for their homes and local leaders) and ordered a new national police and army to take their place. This, as one might imagine, was a disaster and paved the way for the Taliban to start to make their comeback in 2005/2006 and laid the groundwork for a lot of the problems we saw recently.

    Finally, the very fact that starting a war for seemingly narrow interests could spiral into a war of extraordinarily ambitious aims ought to give pause to those who want to start wars with ambitious, ill-defined aims in the first place. Removing Iraq from Kuwait, for instance, is a narrowly-defined interest and achievable goal; turning Iraq into a functioning democracy, on the other hand, is extremely ambitious and difficult to achieve even if it sounds like a good "moral" thing in theory.

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  7. Alan

    While this has been a terrible, predictable outcome. I find it hard to really blame Biden for a lot of this. Was the withdrawal handled badly? Yes. Did we do a shitty job getting our allies out? Yes. Was the collapse of the Afghan government basically guaranteed without another decade+ of our presence? Also yes. Any politician claiming otherwise is feeding their tribe nonsense.

    Look, we live in a country with a representative government. Sure it isn't one without checks against the majority, but when you have a bipartisan super majority of (dumb, shortsighted, currently angry at the obvious outcome) voters who have wanted this for over a decade, eventually someone has to deliver. Biden did. It went predictably horribly with a little extra horrible that was due to his execution.

    Sometimes you just have to let voters punch themselves in the face. Especially when a good chunk of them won't listen to elites who know more than them on this topic. When voters stop listening to elite queues from institutions the only thing left they have to put authority in is what they see, and their (shrinking) community of people they trust. Which means the only thing we can be left to do is give them repeated object lessons in their own stupidity.

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  8. Frank Pepp

    I'm not sure this wasn't the optimal outcome given the on the ground facts. A relatively bloodless transfer of power to the victors. Not something we'll be able to accurately judge for many years.

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  9. cb76

    "If this is how adults behave, let’s give some children a shot."

    Nah we already tried that 5 years ago. We gave the "grown ups" a chance in 2000 and 2004 too, and that was also a disaster. Maybe just give up and accept that nobody with any brains or integrity enters politics in this country.

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    Will Bates

    One of the things I have yet to heard from anyone is 'what they would have done differently,' aside from simply "Stay in Afghanistan."

    The reason why I think that is important is two-fold. Firstly, when drawing down troops, there inevitably comes a time when the number of troops you have in the field reaches a critical low - the threshold at which the number of troops in deployment is not sufficient to hold back the enemy. Generally you tackle that problem by evacuating as quickly as humanly possible. If you evacuate slowly, you give the enemy an opportunity to overrun your troops. So, you say "Stay in Bagram" - ok, how many troops do you need at Bagram to hold back 70,000 Taliban?

    Secondly, everyone wants to play armchair quarterback when things go bad. "Well if I were charge, things would've gone differently." Well with the benefit of hindsight, I would've won the lottery yesterday. What would you have done yesterday knowing what we knew yesterday?

    Trump clearly had the same intel Biden did, and drew the same conclusion (long before Biden did). I think it's fair to assess blame upon them both for this debacle - as well as upon GWB and Obama, for their collective hands in this mess. But please, spare me the armchair quarterback version - unless you have an idea on what we should've done differently, you clearly don't know enough about the issue to assign blame. I'm sure you had a good solution to the structural engineering of the twin towers too.

    It's a debacle. There is clearly blame to be had - either the gathering of intel, the sharing of intel, the interpretation of the intel, or the ignoring of the intel. But at least some percentage of this debacle is simply the inevitability of what happens when you spend almost $2.5T over 20 years and still end up losing the war.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Poliorcetes

      Because when you have 20 years of non-taliban government, you have clearly lost. Doubling the population, massive increase in women's education, all clearly signs of losing. But I am sure a narco-islamic nation state that allows Al Queda to flourish will have no long term consequences for anyone.

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    2. DJ

      Bagram would’ve been little help. It’s an hour and forty minutes from Kabul by car and only two roads go there. Taliban roadblocks would’ve been easy peasy without thousands of US troops.

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      Pat Riot

      Like any major screw up, we should form a Congressional inquiry and carefully tear apart what mistakes were made so we don't make them again.

      Anything is indeed armchair QB'ing...

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      1. Avatar photo
        Bill Nelson

        A congressional inquiry will surely get to the bottom of the issue. Those dudes are awesome.

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          Synchronize Your Dogmas (Bill B)

          They could be if we could keep the Jim Jordans and Eric Swalwells off of them.

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          Cornelius O’Brien

          Like a bunch of Sherlock Holmeses. Someone posted a link to a Senate Committee report on 'how Bin Laden escaped Tora Bora' and, while it's basically accurate as far as I can tell, the citations for the report are to pseudonymous books, news articles, television reports and all sorts of classic hearsay. I couldn't name one witness they quoted on the record. Such a waste of time, typically.

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