We are now ten days into the Fall of Afghanistan, and we have a little less than a week to go before the August 31 red line. The Taliban say there will be consequences if we cross it. There is a good chance that we will cross it.
Several decades worth of tragic foreign policy blunders have culminated in our present predicament. However, it should always be remembered that the chief reason why the USA is currently enduring the most humiliating defeat in its entire history is because the Biden Administration chose to deliberately botch the May 1, 2021 withdrawal. That is the date both we and the Taliban agreed on in February of 2020, which the United Nations Security Council unanimously endorsed.
I did not vote for Donald Trump either time, and I have no problem acknowledging the fact that he made foreign policy blunders, but the May 1 deadline to withdraw from Afghanistan does not rank among them. The Doha Agreement only had four parts. It was not complicated. President Trump’s purpose was to end our war in Afghanistan, and that is what he did. The Taliban never attacked us again. They even waited to launch their reconquest of Afghanistan until the Biden Administration botched the withdrawal, when we were supposed to be gone.
All we had to do was leave by May 1. Our frantic, two-week ordeal to remove a hundred thousand or so US and international civilians (in addition to thousands of military personnel, and countless thousands of Afghan collaborators) could have easily been spaced out from February to April, and completed by May 1. We could have finally departed Afghanistan in an orderly, face-saving manner. We owed that, at the very least, to everyone who died there.
President Biden said that the current chaos was inevitable. There were, of course, some inevitabilities in Afghanistan. We (US/NATO) cannot stay there forever, so our withdrawal was inevitable. The Afghan National Army backed by US/NATO’s muscle could not defeat the Taliban, and so the Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan was inevitable. However, our inevitable withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Taliban’s inevitable reconquest of their country, were two entirely different things which should have never been allowed to happen simultaneously, or in the wrong order. The current chaos was not inevitable until the Biden Administration chose to ensure that it would be.
The Biden Administration first moved the deadline to September 11, for some reason, and then moved it to August 31, because optics. All summer long, our political, diplomatic, military, and intelligence Establishment watched as district after district and province after province fell to the Taliban. They knew Afghanistan was falling. That the Biden Administration chose to deliberately botch the withdrawal, and that the Biden Administration apparently planned for this chaos to play out on September 11, might be coincidental. However, it certainly does look a lot like the same playbook they used a decade ago.
Just as President Biden has been saying that he wants to get out of Afghanistan, President Obama was inaugurated in January of 2009 after having campaigned for the office of president from 2002 to 2008 on the premise that the Iraq War was a dumb war, and that we needed to get out of Iraq. One month into office, President Obama shook some of his earliest and most serious supporters loose when he began working to botch our 2011 withdrawal from Iraq, to which the Bush Administration and the government of Iraq agreed in 2008. When the government of Iraq rejected the Obama-Biden Administration’s plan to keep our bases and thousands of troops in Iraq forever, the Obama-Biden Administration hedged their bets by implementing the Redirection. The Obama-Biden Administration re-allied the US with the same Qutbists we had been fighting since 2001, launched Operation Timber Sycamore, orchestrated the rise of ISIS, and engineered the worst humanitarian catastrophe since World War Two. With Iraq overrun by jihadi terrorists and on the verge of collapse, the Obama-Biden Administration ensured that our troops would again be sent to Iraq, where they remain to this day.
The Americans elected President Trump in 2016 largely because of his foreign policy platform. The Americans watched for four years as he struggled against the entrenched bureaucracy of the political, diplomatic, military, and intelligence Establishment, which deceived, subverted, and sabotaged President Trump at every level. Refer to Episode 9 of Axios’ “Off the Rails” series, which explains how the Establishment ended President Trump’s “last-minute bid to pull U.S. forces from Afghanistan and swaths of the Middle East, Africa and even Europe ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration.” Instead of saying “yes sir,” the Establishment fought back.
The Biden Administration supposedly represented a return to “normalcy.” Finally, the elite and Ivy League-educated academic intellectual professional technocrats of the Establishment regained full control of US policy. Just as the Obama-Biden Administration inherited and then worked to botch the Iraq withdrawal deadline a decade ago, the Biden Administration inherited and then worked to botch the Afghanistan withdrawal deadline. Just as the Obama-Biden Administration sacrificed hundreds of thousands of human beings in order to create the conditions necessary to again bog our military down in Iraq, the Biden Administration ensured a major, predictable, and unnecessary crisis would be underway in Kabul once the Taliban arrived. Now we have to rescue countless thousands of people. Now we have an excuse to send troops back in substantial numbers. Now we can cause the general public to support the idea of bogging our military down in Afghanistan for another generation.