To further comprehend the hell that President Biden let loose in Afghanistan, I would like to point you toward an article published in The Atlantic back in March by George Packer.
In his piece, Packer focuses on the importance of extracting the Afghans who risked their lives working along side Americans. He writes about personal friendships with Afghans, including one he calls Mohammad. For his dedication to rebuilding his country, for his devotion to democracy, and for his cooperation with American personnel in his country, Mohammad and his family became a target of the Taliban. Fearing for his life and the lives of his wife and six children, Mohammad applied for admission to the United States under the Special Immigrant Visa program. He did this in 2010.
“Wrongful rejections and bureaucratic delays pushed Mohammad’s application back year after year,” writes Packer. “[T]hrough three American presidencies; through strategy reviews, troop drawdowns, and peace negotiations; through several attempts on his life; and through the murder last October of three of his relatives at a wedding ceremony where the Taliban expected to find Mohammad.”
For a decade, Mohammad endured the regurgitated bureaucratic responses that typify the administrative state, always thanking him for his patience while assuring him the process was proceeding expediently. Then on December 30, 2020, he received some good news. He had actually passed the first bar to receive his American visa. Less than a month later, the Taliban caught up with Mohammad.
On January 27 of this year, Mohammad was driving to work with his 10-year-old son when a Toyota Corolla with two men inside cut him off. “What kind of people are these, blocking my way?” Mohammad said aloud. Two other men, hidden behind a low concrete wall on the roadside, opened fire. One round struck Mohammad, but he managed to drive 50 feet before a stream of bullets cut him down from behind. He died in a local hospital, leaving his widow and children, including the 10-year-old boy. After a week of muteness, Mohammad’s son was able to describe what had happened, including the words that the gunmen had yelled: “Where are the American forces to save you? Where are their helicopters? Where are their airplanes? You’re an infidel, a traitor! You helped them for a decade! Where are they now?”
The United States has a long history of betrayal. It’s not that the nation as a whole is collectively guilty in this regard. Rather America suffers from an ailment inherent in all democracies. Any administration can initiate a grand strategy with the full commitment to seeing it through. But eventually there will be a new administration. And if the government under the new administration concludes that the strategic initiative begun by its predecessor is incongruent with its own values and policy goals, then the initiative is ended. This political truism is what gives autocratic governance an advantage over representative governance. The autocrats can plan longterm with little-to-no concern of being removed from power.
So the Bush Administration began its nation-building mission as complementary to its War on Terror with the stated intention of seeing it through, and with the acknowledgement that it would take generations to reach completion. Eventually the war turned unpopular, as wars tend to do, and new administrations were elected, at least in part, to end the war. Some found it impractical and perhaps even immoral to just withdraw all troops at once, some just found it logistically impossible. Attempts were made and negotiations were held, with multiple setbacks that resulted in a redeployment of troops or even surges of troops. The usual end result was that at least some troops would stay in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and the mission continued, albeit in a somewhat stripped-down and muted form. Then Joe Biden was elected President of the United States.
In his book, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, Robert Gates declared of Joe Biden, “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Even former President Barack Obama reportedly had this to say about his former VP: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.” In retrospect, these appraisals should have been heeded as warnings.
We have a president who is as dangerously narcissistic as Donald Trump. Trump hides his narcissism with insecure bombast; Biden hides his with a projection of empathy and stedfast confidence. To this day he maintains that he kept his commitment to the Afghan people by turning their country over to the Taliban. He denied that the Taliban would take over the country, only later to say that he knew they would. And he has denied that China is even a competitor to the United States.
And we're only now 9 months in to his presidency.