Biden’s Disaster in Afghanistan, One Year On

This article was published at The Washington Examiner.

Gen. Frank McKenzie, the head of U.S. Central Command when Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, fell to jihadists on Aug. 15, 2021, recently told Politico : “My belief is we should have stayed. I believe that everything that happened flowed from that basic decision [to withdraw].” McKenzie is quite right about this.

President Joe Biden and his surrogates have sometimes allowed that mistakes were made in the execution of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. How could they not after scenes of Afghans falling from moving planes and the massacre of 200 people at the Kabul airport by the Islamic State. But tactical mistakes during the withdrawal pale when set against the ultimate decision: stay or go.

Implicitly accepting this truth, the administration’s public messaging has stressed that the withdrawal date was set by former President Donald Trump. “My predecessor had made a deal with the Taliban,” Biden said. “When I came into office, we faced a deadline — May 1.… We faced one of two choices: Follow the agreement of the previous administration… or send in thousands of more troops and escalate the war.”

This is disingenuous in at least three ways.

First, the February 2020 Trump-Taliban “Doha deal” was not really a deal: it was a surrender instrument, providing for the “complete” withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, and not much else. If the Biden team stuck to criticizing Trump’s “deal” — with its release of 5,000 jihadists and the grave political wound it inflicted on the Afghan government — there would be little to argue about, though it would then beg the question of why the administration insisted on adhering to it.

Second, Biden’s hands were not tied by the “deal”, as he himself showed by extending the withdrawal date by four months. Biden, on his first day, began reversing his predecessors policies, including on national security issues, notably Iran. The legal-political basis for withdrawing from the Doha deal was self-evident: to the extent it had any conditions, such as intra-Afghan talks, the Taliban violated them all by continuing its policy — and openly proclaiming its intention — of violently overthrowing the Afghan government.

Third, the choice was not to withdraw or “escalate” in Afghanistan: Biden could simply have done nothing and sustained the situation as it had been for nearly a decade. The war, in any serious sense, had been over since 2014, with U.S. troop levels at or below 15,000 since then, and U.S. killed-in-action totals never above 30 annually, fewer fatalities than the U.S. Army suffers in training accidents. The reality is that Biden came into office with an ideological fixation on “ending” the “forever war” in Afghanistan.

The problem is that the enemy gets a vote. If you withdraw while the enemy still has the will to fight, this is called “defeat.” Biden would not be dissuaded from his reckless course by evidence, however.

While it is entirely fair for the Biden administration to argue that it inherited a situation in Afghanistan from Trump that had been made needlessly worse, politically and militarily, it is false to claim that it was past the point of no return. It was Biden’s actions that ensured the collapse of the Afghan government and the takeover of the country by an integrated jihadist network — the Taliban, al Qaeda, and the Haqqani Network — largely controlled by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

The Afghan army sacrificed 66,000 lives to defend their country, 5,000 of them in the last few weeks , which is remarkable since, by that time, Biden had sapped their morale, with his April confirmation the U.S. was abandoning the country, and then crippled the Afghan military, withdrawing direct U.S. air support and the contractor services so Afghanistan’s own jets and helicopters no longer worked, and ceasing intelligence provision and logistics. As was bluntly concluded later , this “meant the Afghan military simply couldn’t operate anymore.”

The most disgraceful thing Biden did during last year’s fiasco was to blame the Afghans for what he had done to them, lambasting Afghan President Ashraf Ghani for refusing to stay to be murdered in his capital city after Biden had opened the gates to the jihadists, and denigrating the Afghan army for “not [being] willing to fight for themselves.”

The Biden administration is clearly hoping that the killing of al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri on July 31 will change the narrative around the anniversary of the withdrawal in a more favorable direction. It should not. Unfortunately, the killing of al Zawahiri will have a negligible effect on al Qaeda, and mostly highlights dangerous trends resulting from Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.

For a start, it is quite obvious the ISI knew where al Zawahiri was, since their favorite jihadists were protecting him, just as the ISI sheltered Osama bin Laden up to 2011. The Biden administration has done nothing to settle accounts with Pakistan for its relentless use of jihadists in its foreign policy, the killing of hundreds of our soldiers and thousands of Afghan civilians, nor its decades-long record of having a hand in nearly every international security crisis .

Moreover, as McKenzie told Politico, al Zawahiri being found in Kabul shows “the Taliban obviously negotiated the Doha accord in complete bad faith. They said they wouldn’t provide a safe haven for al Qaeda. What’s the definition of a safe haven if it’s not the leader in your capital city?” The latest United Nations monitoring report documented in some detail the benefits that have accrued to al Qaeda because of the Taliban takeover.

Biden’s people have claimed al Zawahiri’s demise as a victory for their “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism strategy, but this remains the “over-the-rainbow” idea it always was. A single strike in a year is not proof of concept, not least because we have no idea about the intelligence stream that led to it.

What is clear, again per McKenzie, is the U.S. now has “1% or 2% or 3% of the intelligence-gathering capability that we had before we left.” Not only has al Qaeda been given its state back, as it had before 9/11, but the Islamic State has been on the march in Afghanistan, potentially nearing a capability to recapture territory and evidently set on attacking the West. The U.S. has no visibility into the threats building in Afghanistan, and thus no way of accessing the information needed for a sustained counterterrorism campaign — even if Biden had the political will for such a thing, which seems doubtful.

A year ago, Biden left behind at least 200 Americans and tens of thousands of Afghans who stood with NATO for over twenty years. Most of the Americans are now out, though the Taliban continues to hold at least two American hostages, Mark Frerichs and Paul Overby , and there are still nearly 75,000 Afghans working through a Kafkaesque U.S. bureaucracy, many from within Afghanistan, a country now under political terror and economic ruin.

Getting to safety those who believed in us enough to risk their lives is the minimum that can be expected of Western governments. Beyond that, there is not much that can be done, except to ensure the history is not re-written by partisans and to finally apply the sanctions and other coercive policies that treat Pakistan as the enemy state it is.