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.
It’s true, Trump’s disastrous deal with the Taliban would have had us withdraw by May 1, but because Biden was such a grown-up, he extended the deadline to Sept. 11—the 20-year anniversary of the attack that set this war in motion. In messaging terms, it was singularly the most idiotic date Biden could pick. But he justified the extension to ensure that, “We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit. We’ll do it—we’ll do it responsibly, deliberately and safely.”
On Sunday, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken what to make of the fact that the spectacle in Afghanistan didn’t look particularly responsible, deliberate or safe. Blinken’s response: “I think it shows that we were prepared. The president was prepared for every contingency as this moved forward.”
But Blinken also admitted, “the fact of the matter is, we’ve seen that that force has been unable to defend the country, and that has happened more quickly than we anticipated.”
On Monday, Biden confirmed that he was taken by surprise by the rapidity of the Afghan government’s collapse but said it was because the Afghans were “unwilling” to fight. He made the obligatory “the buck stops with me” nod but also insisted the calamity was the fault of the Afghan army, which was trained and organized to depend on U.S. support.
“In the wake of President Biden’s withdrawal decision,” the Wall Street Journal reported, “the U.S. pulled its air support, intelligence and contractors servicing Afghanistan’s planes and helicopters. That meant the Afghan military simply couldn’t operate anymore.”
You’d think adults would have understood this and planned accordingly. The collapse of the Afghan government wasn’t inevitable until we made it inevitable.
When I say “we,” I mean the entirety of the U.S. government and the foreign policy establishment. The military should have understood that immediately cutting off support would cripple the Afghan military. Knowing this, someone should have threatened to resign as a way to forestall this calamity.
This was Biden’s decision, and he deserves all of the scorn he gets for it, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Trump administration made this choice easy for him. If Trump had his druthers, we would have left even earlier, and the Taliban’s takeover would be just as assured. (Trump himself congratulated Biden’s “wonderful” decision to withdraw.) It may not have happened as quickly, but the strategic goal was the same: abandon the Afghans the same way Trump abandoned the Kurds.
Perhaps what’s most infuriating about this debacle is how its defenders, on both the left and right, cling to the idea that they’re the sober realists. We should only go to war when it’s in our narrow, vital self-interest, they thunder, forgetting that we invaded Afghanistan in the first place for precisely such reasons, with the most bipartisan support for use of force since we declared war on Japan.
The Biden administration justified our withdrawal on the grounds that we need to switch to more serious geopolitical rivalries, as with China. Maybe we do. But doing so didn’t require pulling a few thousand troops and contractors from Afghanistan. More importantly, does anyone truly believe that this self-inflicted blow to our national honor will improve our standing in the world? The signal sent to Taiwan—and China—is that we can’t be counted on.
That message, heard around the world, is an unforced strategic blunder. It’s also a moral one.
Biden made “America is back” the unofficial slogan of his presidency. Imagine how that phrase sounds to the Afghans swarming the Kabul airport. Or how it would have sounded to the poor souls who clung to the outside of a transport plane before they plummeted to their deaths? Or how hollow it sounds to the millions of Afghan girls facing forced marriages to Taliban fighters?
If this is how adults behave, let’s give some children a shot.
If you look at the ratio of troop numbers to actual results, it's looking like our deployment to Afghanistan is one of the most successful and effective in our history. With only a few thousand troops in place we were keeping the entire country from collapsing. And we let it collapse because our political class wanted to make a statement about "ending forever wars." (If we were really doing that, we would be bringing home troops from Korea - an actual war that never technically ended. It would be an extraordinarily stupid decision, but that seems to be par for the course.) It was a pointless and self-destructive gesture, and in a just world everyone involved in the decision would be stepping down and retiring from public life.
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.