Throughout the entire process of negotiating a truce with the Taliban, officials from the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations were pretending that the Taliban could be a legitimate partner that would negotiate in good faith with its 20-year enemy the United States. The Taliban played them for fools but they were willing accomplices in their own deception.
Under both Obama and Trump we violated Afghanistan’s own constitution by giving the Taliban a role in the new government. Trump, who criticized Obama for “negotiating with our sworn enemy the Taliban,” would eight years later boast of his special “relationship” with the Taliban leader.
In truth, the Taliban have demonstrated repeatedly that they have no compunction about betraying any agreement. Ceasefires, truces, treaties, contracts and agreements are mere “tactical adjuncts,” similar to what historian Robert Conquest said of the Soviets. They are necessarily used in the meantime to gain an upper hand on the enemy for when hostilities resume.
When Trump agreed to negotiate with the Taliban, they used the ceasefire period as a strategic pause to preposition themselves for the full takeover of Afghanistan which would commence at the very moment of American withdrawal. During this period of negotiation, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in a display of American good faith, pressured the Afghan government to release 5000 jihadist prisoners, many of whom immediately rejoined the ranks of the Taliban and al Qaeda. Again, Pompeo began and led this effort, setting the target date for withdrawal for May 1, 2021, and he justified this settlement with some of the most preposterous public statements. He claimed the Taliban would help us fight al-Qaeda.
But that was the previous administration. And it is plausible that had they executed a withdrawal that resulted in the Taliban advancing on Kabul, that someone within the administration may have persuaded Trump to immediately re-engaged the enemy. After all, the Taliban had repeatedly violated the terms of the original agreement with Trump.
But Joe Biden won the presidency, and in April this year the president announced that he would continue the previous administration’s plan for leaving Afghanistan.
This first obvious mistake was strategic: the decision to withdraw regardless of the conditions on the ground. Said one administration official at the time, “This is not conditions-based. The president has judged that a conditions-based approach, which has been the approach of the past two decades, is a recipe for staying in Afghanistan forever.”
The second inexplicable mistake was both strategic and political: The president set the target date for its completion to be the 20th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attack on American soil. Jonah Goldberg has called this the single most absurd and unforced propaganda gift one country has ever given to an enemy in modern history.* This ridiculously tone-deaf decision, particularly the attempt to make it symbolic, has now only revealed itself to be tragically ironic.
In July, Biden insisted that the Afghan government would not fall to the Taliban. “The likelihood that there’s going to be a Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely,” he said. When asked about the potential of a “second Saigon,” the infamous April 30, 1975 evacuation of the US embassy in Vietnam, Biden adamantly responded, “The Taliban is not the South, the North Vietnamese army. They’re not—they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you’re going to see people being lifted off the roof of our embassy.” Apparently Biden sees the Taliban and their al-Qaeda associates as another JV team of incompetent misfits. The power of denial on display.
Well, that basically is what we saw. Afghans fearing for their lives, clinging to the outside of US military aircraft as it took off. This was completely predictable and it was indeed widely predicted. Yet the Biden Administration actually seems to be caught back on its heels, as events in Afghanistan have exceedingly outpaced the decision making in Washington. We are witnessing a panic in the White House, as our leaders were simply unprepared for the inevitable. Secretary of State Antony Blinken maintains that what we have witnessed is “manifestly not Saigon.”
When asked to justify this hasty withdrawal and its obvious repercussions, he cited the 20-year cost of nearly $1 trillion and 2,300 American soldiers lost. But this is the price that has already been paid, and paid over a 20-year period. If you purchased a car, then later found out that you grossly overpaid for it, your first instinct should not be to then drive the car over a cliff. Not to mention the trillions of dollars our current congress is willing to spend over a weekend. Until the recent ISIS-K terrorist attack at the Kabul airport, the last American soldier to die in combat had been 17 months ago in Iraq.
In May of this year, the Military Times reported that, “In the year since Memorial Day, 2020, 18 U.S. service members have died while supporting overseas operations…. And, as of May 27, there have been three deaths in 2021…. None of the deaths were caused by hostile forces, and most were attributable to vehicle accidents. A U.S. servicemember has not been killed in action since March 11, 2020.”
The 18 mostly-accidental deaths occurred not just in Afghanistan and Iraq, but in the Arabian Sea, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kosovo, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Not to mention that we still maintain military bases in Japan, South Korea, and Europe, and in a much larger capacity than we did in Afghanistan.
It would seem that Biden’s focus on leaving Afghanistan is merely for a political slogan. He wants to say he ended the longest war in American history. This has the facade of symbolic victory but it is a dubious claim at best.
M. Danko
September 16, 2021
Terse.blog
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* See “Cruel Summer," The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg (August 14, 2021) #384