Blog No. 287. Afghanistan and the Coming Debacle

President Biden’s decision to withdraw all American forces from Afghanistan by September 11 may turn out to be one of the more significant decisions of his presidency. It followed a thorough review in which, by all accounts, he respectfully listened to, and presumably considered, the unanimous advice from senior military commanders that conflicted with his own personal and political instincts. That process was surely a marked improvement over the chaotic style of his predecessor, but in the end, Biden’s personal instincts prevailed, much as Trump’s usually did.

It cannot be said with assurance that Biden’s instincts and his decision were wrong. It is clear, however, that the decision is a major gamble. The potential for negative consequences is significant and Biden’s rationale for his decision is unconvincing in many respects.

Potential Negative Consequences

There are a variety of negative consequences that may flow from a long-delayed, but now precipitous, withdrawal. One such consequence is obviously the possibility that Afghanistan will again become a venue from which Al Qaeda can again plan and train its operatives for attacks on the United States homeland or on overseas bases. Although the agreement between the Trump administration was supposed to result in a cutting of ties between the Taliban and Al Qaeda, that has not happened. Indeed, the commitment had dubious credibility from the outset. As Senator Lindsey Graham and retired General Jack Keane put it, “Imagine outsourcing our national security to the Taliban. To expect the Taliban to police al Qaeda and ISIS is like asking the fox to guard the henhouse.”

Their cynicism seems justified in light of a January report from the Inspector General of the Treasury Department:

Treasury told us, as of 2020, al-Qaeda is gaining strength in Afghanistan while continuing to operate with the Taliban under the Taliban’s protection. Treasury told us Al-Qaeda capitalizes on its relationship with the Taliban through its network of mentors and advisers who are embedded with the Taliban, providing advice, guidance, and financial support.

In addition, as CIA Chief William Burns recently testified, the departure of American troops from Afghanistan will leave a “significant risk” of terrorism resurgence in the region.” When the time comes for the U.S. military to withdraw, the U.S. government’s ability to collect and act on threats will diminish,” he continued. “That is simply a fact.”  

A second serious consequence is that, without American military support, the Afghan government is likely to fail, perhaps sooner rather than later. When that occurs, the Taliban will resume its reign of harsh Islamic fundamentalism with suffering to the Afghan people that is hard to imagine. The most conspicuous victims of the Taliban will be Afghan women, whose progress and stunning achievements over the past twenty years will be erased. But women will be far from the only objects of Taliban brutality. High on the list for retaliation will be Afghans who worked for or cooperated with American forces. As Phil Caruso wrote in the Washington Post,

Hundreds of thousands of Afghans have risked their lives directly supporting U.S. forces in positions ranging from security guards to cooks to interpreters. Approximately 17,000 Afghan former interpreters alone await adjudication of their Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) applications….America’s Afghan allies face severe consequences at the hands of the Taliban. The Taliban have long insisted that those Afghans who have worked for the United States should be punished by death. They have delivered on this promise time and again.

Moreover, the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan will not be confined within its borders. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Pentagon leaders advised the President that a Taliban takeover would produce “waves of Afghan refugees rushing to neighboring countries and Europe.”

The Biden Rationale

President Biden began the justification for his decision by citing changes in the nature of the threat that initially took us into Afghanistan.

The Threat From Afghanistan.

I believed that our presence in Afghanistan should be focused on the reason we went in the first place: To ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base from which to attack our homeland again. We did that. We accomplished that objective. I said, among with others, we’d follow Osama Bin Laden to the gates of hell, if need be. That’s exactly what we did, and we got him. It took us close to 10 years to put President Obama’s commitment into form. And that’s exactly what happened. Osama Bin Ladin was gone.

The dispatching of Osama Bin Laden was a notable accomplishment, but that feat did not by any means “ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base from which to attack our homeland again.” Nor is such assurance provided by the flimsy agreement with the Taliban entered into by the Trump administration or by conditions on the ground today.

Biden continued by noting that the terrorist threat has “metastasized” to other countries and regions, citing terrorist presence in Somalia, the Arabian Peninsula, Syria and “multiple countries in Africa and Asia.” Attention to such threats, however, does not require the removal of the small force that remains in Afghanistan today. (The 3,500 troops in Afghanistan amount to 0.25 per cent of active duty military personnel.) Similarly, Biden asserted the need to concentrate on a variety of other challenges, domestic and foreign, ranging from competitiveness with China to dealing with pandemics. All that is true enough, but there is no reason why a continued presence in Afghanistan should be an impediment to meeting those challenges. Conversely, depending on the consequences of our withdrawal, Afghanistan may become even more of a distraction from our other responsibilities.

As for the potential threat of terrorists operating from Afghanistan, Biden was notably vague:

We’ll reorganize our counter-terrorism capabilities and the substantial assets in the region to prevent re-emergence of terrorists, the threat to our homeland from over the horizon. We’ll hold the Taliban accountable for its commitment not to allow any terrorists to threaten the United States or its allies from Afghan soil.  

Who knows what the “reorganization” of capabilities and assets in the region might consist of? And the notion of holding the Taliban accountable, for its “commitment” to prevent terrorist threats from Afghanistan, will strike many as fanciful. Hold the Taliban accountable? Just how? Apart from reliance on the wispy reed of vague Taliban assurances, Biden gave no indication of how the United States would surveil and, if necessary, disrupt terrorist activity in Afghanistan. An April 19 article in the Washington Post outlines the considerable difficulties the United States will face in attempting to do so by operating out of  Pakistan, Qatar or Uzbekistan. On Tuesday, General Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, Commander of the Army’s Central Command said that, while a campaign against extremists in Afghanistan carried on from outside the country would not be impossible, it would be “extremely difficult.”

The Agreement with the Taliban.

Biden also justified his action on grounds of complying with the agreement with the Taliban entered into by the Trump administration:

When I came to office, I inherited a diplomatic agreement, duly negotiated between the government of the United States and the Taliban, that all US forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, just three months after my inauguration. That’s what we inherited, that commitment. It is perhaps not what I would have negotiated myself, but it was an agreement made by the United States government; and that means something.

The agreement with the Taliban was a glaring specimen of diplomatic malpractice. It was a largely one-sided arrangement negotiated without the participation of the Afghan government and memorialized in a document of shoddy draftsmanship. (For a critique of the agreement, and a copy of its text, see Blog No. 250. “Afghanistan: Not a Deal But a Fig Leaf.”) For all its faults, the agreement did appear to place some obligations on the Taliban. While those obligations are not spelled out with great clarity, a fair reading of the agreement requires the Taliban not only to disengage from Al Qaeda, but to negotiate in good faith with the Afghan government. Although the Taliban have failed on both counts, Biden made no reference to that fact. His promise to hold the Taliban accountable in the future is undermined by his failure to hold them accountable for their performance to date. In short, it appears that for Biden, no less than Trump, the agreement is a fig leaf to cover our exit.

Continued Support for Afghanistan.

Biden attempted to sugar-coat our withdrawal by citing respects in which we would continue to support Afghanistan:

While we’ll not stay involved in Afghanistan militarily, our diplomatic and humanitarian work will continue. We’ll continue to support the government of Afghanistan. We will keep providing assistance to the Afghan national defenses and security forces. Along with our partners, we have trained and equipped a standing force of over 300,000 Afghan personnel today and hundreds of thousands over the past two decades. They’ll continue to fight valiantly on behalf of the Afghans at great cost. They’ll support peace talks, as we will support peace talks between the government of Afghanistan and the Taliban, facilitated by the United Nations. And we’ll continue to support the rights of Afghan women and girls by maintaining significant humanitarian and development assistance.

Biden did not indicate the nature or extent of the “assistance to the Afghan national defenses and security forces” to be provided. Gen. Haibatullah Alizai, the commander of Afghanistan’s Special Operations Corps, has said that the units under his command need “armed surveillance drones, more warplanes and advanced light arms, among other equipment.” A drastic reduction in American air support in 2020 significantly impacted the effectiveness of Afghanistan’s military units. In any case, the fact is that, whatever it consists of, the judgment of our military commanders is that it will be insufficient without the participation of American military personnel.

Notably, the impact of our withdrawal will be compounded by that of the NATO military personnel who will follow our lead with their own departure. As Biden acknowledged, our allies and partners “now have more forces in Afghanistan than we do;” thus, our withdrawal amounts to a perverse exercise in reverse leverage.

The claim of continued support for Afghan women and girls has a particularly hollow ring. Whatever “humanitarian and development assistance” we proffer will provide little protection from the brutality of a Taliban regime.

Reliance on Other Countries. 

Biden suggested that:

[W]e’ll ask other countries — other countries in the region — to do more to support Afghanistan, especially Pakistan, as well as Russia, China, India, and Turkey.  They all have a significant stake in the stable future for Afghanistan.

Each of the countries mentioned by Biden have their own competing interests and few of them are aligned with those of the United States or, for that matter, our ostensible ally, the government of Afghanistan. Expecting them to produce a formula for a stable Afghanistan, individually or collectively, seems even less plausible than expecting the Taliban to police Al Qaeda.

The Service and Sacrifice of American Military Personnel. 

Biden paid eloquent tribute to Americans who have fought, died and been wounded in Afghanistan:

The fact is that later today, I’m going to visit Arlington National Cemetery, Section 60, and that sacred memorial to American sacrifice. Section 60 is where our recent war dead are buried, including many of the women and men who died fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. There is no comforting distance in history in section 60. The grief is raw. It’s a visceral reminder of the living cost of war.
For the past 12 years, ever since I became vice-president, I’ve carried with me a card that reminds me of the exact number of American troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. That exact number, not an approximation or rounded off number because every one of those dead are sacred human beings who left behind entire families, an exact accounting of every single solitary one needs to be had. As of today, there are 2,488 US troops and personnel who’ve died in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, our Afghanistan conflicts. 20,722 have been wounded.

Biden then added a uniquely personal note:

I’m the first president in 40 years who knows what it means to have a child serving in a war zone. Throughout this process, my North Star has been remembering what it was like when my late-son Beau was deployed to Iraq. How proud he was to serve his country. How insistent he was to deploy with his unit and the impact it had on him and all of us at home.

Biden’s remarks are of the sort he delivers well, perhaps better than any president in memory. His sincerity and empathy are obvious, genuine and unimpeachable. And yet he did not address a fundamental question: Do we dishonor the service and sacrifice of those who fought and died or were wounded by turning the country over to the Taliban? Beau Biden was justifiably proud to serve in Afghanistan: would he and his comrades in arms be proud to abandon the country because we have become weary of the conflict?

Lack of a Road to Success.

In the end, the most persuasive, arguably the only persuasive, element in Biden’s rationale was the lack of a clear road to success in Afghanistan:

If we instead pursue the approach where America, US exit, is tied to conditions on the ground, we have to have clear answers to the following questions: Just what conditions would be required to allow us to depart? By what means and how long would it take to achieve them, if they could be achieved at all? And at what additional cost in lives and treasure? I’ve not heard any good answers to these questions. If you can’t answer them, in my view, we should not stay.

Those are fair questions to which thus far there appear to be no clear and compelling answers. They are questions that Congress should explore in public hearings such as those planned by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The burden on the United States in lives and treasure is a bearable one. In terms of treasure, the current level of $50 billion annually is a small fraction of the Defense budget (and equivalent to a wee corner in Biden’s current infrastructure proposal). As to lives, Bret Stephens pointed out that “the U.S. has lost fewer than 20 service members annually in hostile engagements in Afghanistan since 2015. That’s heartbreaking for those affected, but tiny next to the number of troops who die in routine training accidents worldwide.” On the other hand, defeat of the Taliban seems unlikely, and if their ultimate control of Afghanistan is unavoidable, it may be that Biden is correct in deciding, in effect, to accept that grim result. But a withdrawal now should not be done under the illusion that things will somehow work out, because there is very little prospect that they will.