The White House either had bad intelligence about the staying power of the Afghan Armed Forces or ignored it. Either was a colossal mistake.
Credit: Master Sgt. Donald R. Allen/U.S. Air Forces Europe-Africa/Getty Images
U.S. President Joseph Biden’s decision to pull the U.S. military out of Afghanistan was correct, but the way the retreat was carried out is a national disgrace.
After 20 years, more than $1 trillion spent and 3,605 U.S. and allied soldiers killed, it was clear the effort to remake Afghanistan into a functioning democracy was built on quicksand. During their tenures, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama refused to admit that the country is a quagmire for foreign invaders, as the Soviet Union learned in the 1980s and the British before that.
While Biden was gutsy to follow through on the withdrawal initiated by his predecessor, Donald Trump, the U.S. failed to adequately plan for the complex evacuation of Americans and Afghan compatriots. The White House either had bad intelligence about the staying power of the Afghan Armed Forces, which disintegrated in two weeks, or ignored it. Either was a colossal mistake.
Most galling is that Biden left behind tens of thousands of interpreters, contractors and other Afghans who had aided U.S. and NATO forces. Their fates are now at the mercy of the vengeful Taliban. He ignored pleas from U.S. allies to extend Washington’s Aug. 31 deadline so more of these partners could be evacuated. We’ve criticized Trump on these pages for damaging the NATO alliance. This has only done further harm.
To be sure, Biden inherited a bad situation. The Doha Agreement signed with the Taliban well before his election committed to a withdrawal of American forces in 2021. Local Afghan leaders, seeing that the U.S. was leaving, looked to the future and cut deals with the Taliban. But even when the U.S. inexplicably abandoned Bagram Air Base in July, there seemed to be little urgency to evacuate Western citizens and Afghan allies. Was the administration asleep at the switch?
The last-minute U.S. airlift of 124,000 people from Kabul’s besieged airport certainly was a well-executed operation by skilled servicemembers. But Biden’s characterization of the withdrawal as an “extraordinary success” was offensive, coming so soon after 13 American military personnel and scores of Afghan civilians were killed in a terrorist attack as the evacuation was underway.
In 2003, Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared victory in the Iraq war under a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished.” That image haunted him as the U.S. became bogged down in Iraq for years. Biden’s “extraordinary success” may come to haunt him, too.
