Joe Biden Chose Catastrophe in Afghanistan
This article was published in The Telegraph.
The Taliban took over Afghanistan’s capital on Sunday after a nine-day offensive captured one provincial capital after another. The United States had already decided to abandon the country, and without the US the other NATO states had no choice but to leave. It was quite clear that the Afghan state would crumble in the absence of a Western presence, though it seems President Joe Biden thought he would have a longer “decent interval” before the Saigon evacuation scenes and the massacres began.
Biden's claim the withdrawal merely followed an agreement he inherited from Donald Trump is misleading in all respects. Biden has reversed many Trump policies he disapproved of. Moreover, Trump did not sign a “deal” as such with the Taliban in February 2020, but a withdrawal agreement, essentially an unconditional one. US troops had been withdrawing from Afghanistan since October 2019, if not before, and Trump had telegraphed his desperation for a fig-leaf to cover this policy.
To the extent the Taliban can be said to have agreed to anything, it was to prevent areas it controls being used by Al-Qaeda—which it cannot do, since Al-Qaeda is so deeply interwoven, practically and ideologically, with the Taliban—and to engage in peace talks with the Afghan government, which it also refused to do.
The Taliban never recognised the now-fallen Afghan government or constitution. America's decision not to begin by insisting that the Taliban change this position, and instead to engage the Taliban directly over the heads of the leadership in Kabul, was only the first in a disastrous series of steps within the framework of this so-called peace process that gutted the capacity and morale of the Afghan state, while bolstering the Taliban, both in legitimacy and on the battlefield.
While the Afghan government was circumvented and denigrated, the Taliban was treated as a legitimate international actor. This never stopped, despite the fact that the Taliban never ceased its public affirmations that its policy was violent jihad until it had conquered the whole country. Astonishingly, US. officials were speaking until just a few days ago of the importance of what happened in Doha, Qatar, where the “negotiations” took place; the Taliban occupied nine provincial capitals by that time.
The most important concrete damage this fictional peace process did to all hopes of peace and decency in Afghanistan was twofold. The US halted active military operations, giving Pakistan eighteen months to repair, re-arm, re-equip, and re-organise the Taliban and its other jihadi proxies to prepare them for the final assault as the US and NATO got out of the way. Reinforcing this trend, the US forced Kabul to release 5,000 hardened jihadists, many of whom re-joined the jihad and some of whom have been prominent over the last few days. It is, therefore, in extremely bad faith when commentators suggest that the collapse of the Afghan army is evidence that the mission was hopeless all along.
It is true that NATO built a military structure that required an ongoing role for Western advisers and logistics. It is true that the Afghan army had all kinds of failings—from ghost soldiers to corruption to abuses. It is also true that buttressed by a few thousand Westerners, this army kept the Taliban-Qaeda forces at bay for twenty years, and collapsed only after the Western keystone was removed and the political legs were cut from under Kabul and Western negotiators bolstered the jihadists.
The Biden administration officials and media surrogates currently putting about the idea of an “intelligence failure”, then, are talking self-conscious nonsense. Nobody was unaware of what would happen if this policy was carried out, least of all Biden, who was Vice President for eight years before he was President. This is a lame effort to deflect blame. Biden knew the Trump “deal” and the “intra-Afghan talks” were fictional, and chose to continue the policy because of an ideological commitment to ending “forever wars”.
Biden and his team simply do not care about the jihadist takeover of Afghanistan, except in so far as it does them political damage. As the Taliban sets about imposing its iron theocracy, one immediate effect is going to be a humanitarian catastrophe within Afghanistan as the Taliban slaughters anyone associated with the old regime, and anyone who can leaves, escalating the refugee outflow that risks a repeat of the 2015 crisis in Europe and the attendant political radicalism we still haven’t recovered from.
The US betrayal of its allies in Afghanistan is so complete that, despite months of warnings, no proper provision has been made to evacuate those Afghans who worked with us. The security and strategic effects are if anything even worse.
A justification for this withdrawal is that it permits a focus on great power competition, rather than mere counterterrorism. But the distinction collapses upon inspection: China and Iran are among the major beneficiaries, for example, and Al-Qaeda will be back in force in a Talibanised Afghanistan.
This is not even to mention the Islamic State’s Khorasan Province, over a thousand of whose members were reportedly freed over the last few days in Taliban prison breaks. Put simply, the West has created the worst of all possible worlds from this withdrawal—and for no reason. A sustainable situation, secured by a “light footprint”, was already in place.
The worst part of this senseless waste is that after all the killing and destruction enabled by us leaving, we will likely have to come back soon. The idea of Afghanistan as a remote, ignorable place is what led us to abandoning Afghanistan to Pakistan after the Soviets were out in the 1980s. At the end of that policy road was 9/11, which drew us back in. We have learned nothing.