A key pillar of foreign policy is to project the notion that you are a good friend to have, as well as a bad enemy to have. In the last decade the United States has done the opposite. We have regularly turned our back on our allies, abandoned projects we started, and appeased those who want to see us destroyed.
The last three American presidents made it clear they wanted out of Afghanistan. Obama caved to the military brass that wanted a troop surge in 2009, but he lowered the number of troops in the surge and he prematurely announced its withdrawal date, signaling to the Taliban then that they could just lay low and wait it out, effectively retarding the potential effectiveness of a surge. Trump’s populist approach to politics mandated that he pull back American military presence around the world. Biden looked at the polls and decided it was politically advantageous to end an unpopular war. And since Trump and Pompeo had already set the wheels of withdrawal in motion, Biden conceivably had plausible deniability should things go south.
This type of political ambivalence coming out of Washington for the past twelve plus years has finally come to a head. What was missing in these administrations was a statesman; someone willing to take the political fallback of doing what was right but unpopular.
It is part of an innate flaw in democracy. One administration can start a longterm project with the full intention of seeing it through, only to lose an election and then see its successor cancel everything it began. On the other hand, authoritarian states, where the rulers don’t have to worry about being voted out of office, don’t have this problem. Meaning they can plan long term. And this creates a major disadvantage for American foreign policy in regard to nations like China, Russia, Iran, and now most likely Afghanistan.
The most pathetic aspect to this humiliating self-defeat was summed up by John Podhoretz, who made the most obvious observation that all President Biden had to do to avoid such a calamity was … nothing.
We stand exposed today not as a country that finally exited a war we could no longer even imagine a victory in, as had been the case in 1975. Rather, we are revealed as a country led by a feckless president who chose to refuse to grapple with the obvious potential consequences of a decision he wanted to make so he could be declared a war-ender and a peace-maker. History will declare him something else, something worse, something darker. The real horror for Afghanis is that history will begin to make its declaration about Joe Biden this week, as the Taliban begin working their depravity on them and the nation from which we once rightly took great national pride in having liberated.As for the United States and its foreign policy, we are in uncharted territory. No country has ever really done what we did here. No country has ever deliberately chosen and charted a course into its own humiliation when there was no national demand for withdrawal above all things.
The Biden Administration was betting that public support for the war was so low that Americans would support a withdrawal no matter the consequences. And it was true that most polls showed a plurality of voters wanted out of Afghanistan. However, in recent years when these polls were being conducted, a growing number of participants had simply refused to answer the question. Clearly there are a substantial number of voters who are open to maintaining some presence in Afghanistan if the benefits outweigh the costs, as more recent polls since the fall of Afghanistan suggest.
This is now the legacy of President Joesph Biden, now just 8 months into his presidency. Those within the administration may hope that the three years before the next presidential election will be enough time for voters to forget the calamity they just witnessed. But many Americans already see this moment through the same lens as they saw September 11. And like that moment, their response is Never Again.