“American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war, and dying in a war, the Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves,” Joe Biden said, on Monday afternoon, addressing the nation 24 hours after a frenzied Taliban offensive culminated in the fall of Kabul.
America gave the country money and lives, but couldn’t given Afghan troops the will to fight, Biden went on to say, conceding that the Taliban took power faster than the US expected.
He outlined a stark choice: Follow through with the agreement Donald Trump struck with the group, or “go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season.”
Biden spoke on a day when the world witnessed chaotic scenes at Kabul airport, where thousands of people gathered in a desperate attempt to leave the country, complicating efforts to safely evacuate US personnel, journalists and scores of Afghans seeking asylum. 6,000 US troops will deploy to Afghanistan to ensure the evacuation isn’t jeopardized.
Read more:
Although he described himself as “deeply saddened” by the facts on the ground, Biden didn’t waver. “I stand squarely behind my decision,” he said. “I am the president of the United States of America. The buck stops with me.”
He sought to explain why the evacuation of Afghan civilians wasn’t completed sooner. “Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave, still hopeful for their country, and part of it because the Afghan government discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering — as they said — a crisis of confidence,” he explained.
The GOP blame game will be unrelenting. Nothing is off limits when it comes to political opportunism. A foreign policy blunder with a glaringly obvious historical parallel is ripe for exploitation. That goes double in a post-Trump era defined by intense partisan rancor and a kind of outright bitterness that turned the already cutthroat world of Beltway chicanery into a no-holds-barred bloodsport.
But the real bloodsport was witnessed firsthand, by American troops, some of whom are likely too young to remember 9/11. No one doubts the collective capability of the US armed forces, nor is there any debate about the capacity of US special operators to stare down any situation they’re asked to confront. But sometimes, I wonder if it occurs to US politicians that sending young men and women to confront battle-hardened descendants of the mujahideen (and in some cases, the genuine article) is no small ask.
The media habitually and instinctually refers to the Taliban as “insurgents,” which is technically accurate but potentially misleading. This isn’t some newly-constituted, loosely-organized band of undertrained misfits with delusions of grandeur. These are serious individuals, to put it mildly, and this ain’t their first rodeo, to speak colloquially. If you had to make a list of worst situations to be in, a mountain gunfight with the Taliban would probably be on it somewhere.
To say it was unclear why America was still, two decades later, subjecting its young men and women to that kind of life-altering trauma would be an understatement. Biden emphasized as much on Monday, noting that although the exit has been “hard and messy,” the alternative was “sending thousands more American troops back into combat and lurching into the third decade of conflict.”
Nobody wants that. Well, nobody other than the Taliban, and that’s really the crux of the matter. They would have fought forever — literally. In fact, just last week, one Taliban commander (a Muhammed Arif Mustafa) told CNN “We’re not in a hurry.” He was talking specifically about an imagined future where the entire world lives under Islamic law, but his assessment was equally applicable to the fight to restore Islamic law in Afghanistan.
Biden decried the Afghan government, which “gave up and fled the country,” as he put it, noting that, “if anything, the developments of the past week reinforce that ending US military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.”
By Monday evening, “Afghan television channels were only putting out pro-Taliban reports [and] there were rumors that the internet might shut down at any moment,” NBC reported, citing a WhatsApp message from an unnamed local. Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar “was on every network,” the same source said.
It seems unlikely that Biden will apologize for the events of the last 48 hours. And it’s not entirely clear that he should. “After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan,” he said, before asking, “How many more American lives is it worth? How many endless rows of headstones at Arlington National?”
Maybe the US will re-deploy the military-industrialized complex to cleaning up the environment and distributing covid vaccines. We certainly can’t “afford” to shrink that portion of our economy!
Ending a war is always a good thing.
Unfortunately, that perspective is easily abused by those willing to kill and die for their beliefs.
At some point the Taliban will have re-established their control over Afghanistan with Islamic Law (as they see it). The question is what is their external thrust then to spread their control over as much of the planet as they can. Or… where will we end up fighting them the next time?
The Taliban are an indigenous, Pushtun phenomenon. Maybe it looks to establish some sort of control over Pushtun areas of Pakistan — which would be deliciously ironic, in that successive Pakistani governments anxious to secure a “strategic defense” buffer have for decades been playing a double game in Afghanistan — but it is extremely unlikely to look any further than that. Without the local, cultural context that has fueled its rise in Afghanistan, the Taliban simply lacks the capacity to project force to other countries/contexts in a meaningful way. For that matter, so does the United States — a lesson our elites and military leaders seem unable to learn or acknowledge.
Very unlikely. The Talibans aren’t really a religious extremist group like AQ. They’re the armed faction of the Pashtun, the biggest ethnic group in Afghanistan. I believe there are Pakistani regions where they also are the majority so I’ll grant you they may want to unite that bit of territory too.
But they seem very willing to leave the islamisation of the world to God alone and that suits me just fine since God obviously does not exist/does not care.
Graveyard of Empires…I am not sure I can remember the Afgans asking to be invaded this time or Ever… Something to do with 9-11 or pipelines or something ? Geopolitics at work maybe !
Though withdrawal is likely the best thing on balance for America, I am disappointed there was not at least some acknowledgement of our own hubris and failures (and maybe a lesson again learned). That would actually make me feel STRONGER. Instead, Biden largely focused on blaming the Afghans for not being fighty enough, and decided that if there were only one person he could throw under the bus after the Afghans, it somehow would be Obama. Meanwhile, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Botlon, Bremer, Trump and Pompeo all get a pass? Man, this bipartisanship is a bitch!
Biden spoke directly, explained clearly, and ultimately took responsibility for following through on what was Trump’s deal. The Republicans are, expectedly, coding at Real Housewives-level red. I guess they would have preferred a president who got up there like a real man and focused on how the cameras were being shut off, claimed no one ever thought we would ever leave Afghanistan in a million years, then topped it off by directly disclaiming responsibility despite previous assurances that “only I could fix it,” all with a clown-level of make-up and hair, you know, to further buttress credibility.
I apologize for this rant-y polifical comment. I already feel like I am commenting here too often of late and want to pull back from that, and I know strictly poltical comments aren’t welcome or helpful here. But sometimes, I just can’t stop myself. If you choose to send me to the unread ether I will completely understand.
But as long as I’ve gone this far, indulge me in a few more words when it comes to national pride and what’s best for the US. I feel pretty unique in the broader scheme of things. My Dad was Chinese, first generation born here. My Mom was Irish/German but her parents were both born here. People can’t tell what race I am — I mostly get Latino, but also get Greek, Jewish, Italian and a woman in a bar even once guessed “Eskimo,” which I told her was an awful guess statistically, but she told me she just had a feeling. (Sort of like expecting a 5% correction after a 100% surge). No one guesses Chinese and I have also had people ask me how I got so good with chopsticks, or said they didn’t think I could be Chinese because I drove well.
My parents were both church-going Christians, but being 60s parents decided to let their 5 children decide for themselves re religion. An admirable approach I believe, but as a result, all 5 of us sort of chose an agnostic nothingness. We have our thoughts, beliefs and feelings, but nothing that has come anywhere close to coalescing into an adherence to a weekly or otherwise regular service, let alone an actual orthodoxy. For the most part, churches, temples and mosques confuse us, though we can still admire their architectural beauty.
So uniquely we are not tied to an ethnicity or a place or a religion, but we have otherwise lived a perfectly conventional life growing up in the Philly suburbs. And for me personally, that has then led me to DC through my formative college years when DC was defined by crack and Mayor Barry, then Annapolis, then LA, then Philly and now just outside Philly. And to finally get to the point, if you asked me what makes me the most proud of my country during my lifetime, I would say by far it is watching the summer or winter olympics and seeing our crazy but awesome quilt of different size, shape and color athletes. The other countries, for the most part, march their monochrome national teams full of blacks or blondes or Asians proudly past the cameras. And then comes the US motley crew of mixes and mutts, and it just makes me feel prideful. I don’t even care where they finish. It’s more interesting to me that they had the chance to legit get into the mix. How many other countries can really say that? That is what makes me proud of my country, as opposed to whatever anyone does during a meaningless ritual.
The conventional American dream of rags to riches may be a bit moribund, but at least our panoply of colors and stripes and beliefs lives on. This is a truly unusual feature of our country, even as other countries slowly catch up to us. This is not naturally or necessarily a tailwind, but even with the inherent racial difficulties, they don’t have to be a headwind either.
We have all the riches, tools and human capital to be successful. As we all start focusing on tightening our belts and worrying about inflation and deficits, what I think we really need now is some clear cut evidence/study on the net benefits to society of keeping some people earning gravity-changing wealth, while others debate a much-needed heart check up versus cutting off their cable in order to afford it. Unlike all the stuff that seems so complicated, that seems pretty simple to me.
Thanks again for your wisdom on this particular score, and from here on out, I will check myself.
I for one appreciate your comment.
The great irony of this conflict is we trained and armed both the Taliban and the Afghan security forces. The one thing this demonstrates is you can’t train the will to fight. The Taliban believe in their cause and are willing to fight forever for it, like the North Vietnamese. The Afghan Security forces weren’t all that interested in the fight. The right time to leave Afghanistan was before we ever invaded them in the first place. We were warned by the Brits before we even went in there that it was a lost cause and that we would spend decades, money, and lives for absolutely nothing at the end. The arrogant Bush administration ignored all of that and send us there anyway. The history of Afghan insurgencies is long and horrible, we just added our names to that history. The politics of this war are hard to argue, both sides contributed and participated. That Biden had the courage to actually get our people out of there is a testament to him. The scenes we’re seeing over there were always going to happen, it was a matter of when. Anyone who didn’t get out of the country once it was announced we would be evacuating was being naïve. But this should be a reminder for all of us in the States, those scenes can happen here too. The insurrection is a warning for us all. The next time an Autocrat is elected president, you better get out of town too.
Young Americans, in particular, forget how the US has contributed to its own problems in the Middle East and Asia. Decades ago we armed Saddam Husein to fight against Iran, the folks who held Americans hostage until Reagan brought them home. Soon Saddam used the treasure and training we provided to attack Israel and Kuwait. We pushed him out of Kuwait in short order but paused at the boarder. After 9/11 we decided that he was somehow responsible for the world’s terrorism and we got rid of him, eventually, and got ourselves mired in a tar baby war (younguns check that one out) that progressed to two fronts for a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives. Of course, we also armed and trained both sides in this last one too (see Charley Wilson’s War). We wanted the Russians out of Afghanistan so we trained the “freedom fighters” for years until the Russians left town and then we moved in to take their place fighting the second generation of the people we had supported and trained, now calling themselves the Talban. Make no mistake, the only people who made out here were some warlords, drug kingpins, and US “private army” contractors who made a huge profit on the war.
It’s cynical, but there’s an element of truth in the idea that we should get out of the way to let Afghans do what they do best – fight each other. Well, they probably fight foreigners better…..