NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE ‘L et’s look at where we are,” former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley told the audience at a CNN town hall on Sunday night. Her assessment of the international-threat environment was grim. From the Iranian nuclear program to brinkmanship from Beijing and Pyongyang to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “We’ve got chaos everywhere.” And yet, Haley added, “none of that would have happened had we not had that debacle in Afghanistan.”
“The idea that we left Bagram Airforce Base in the middle of the night without telling our allies, who stood shoulder to shoulder with us for decades because we asked them to be there,” she continued. “Think about what that told our friends. More importantly, think about what that told our enemies.”
Haley’s claim that the national humiliation Joe Biden engineered for the U.S. in Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 influenced, in particular, the Kremlin’s decision to execute a full-scale invasion of Ukraine several months later has become commonplace on the right. Republican lawmakers from Mitch McConnell to Kevin McCarthy have issued similar accusations. Their charges have been summarily dismissed by proponents of “realism and restraint” in the foreign-policy community and administration officials themselves.
“It’s obvious the invasion was planned before the fall of Afghanistan,” barked Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff general Mark Milley in a February 2023 interview. But outside invested partisan commentators with skin in the American political game, the idea that Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan influenced the Kremlin’s thinking in advance of its most recent invasion of Ukraine isn’t so controversial.
U.S. Air Force general Tod Wolters, who previously served as NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe, told the House Armed Services Committee in March 2022 that Vladimir Putin was “attempting to take advantage of fissures that could have appeared in NATO as a result of the post-Afghanistan environment.”
François Hollande, who served as the first secretary of France’s Socialist Party before ascending to the presidency between 2012 and 2017, agreed that Biden’s conduct might have convinced Putin that he had a free hand in Europe. “When the United States withdrew from Afghanistan, it showed signs of weakness, and Vladimir Putin interpreted it as a success for himself,” Hollande insisted. “Each of our withdrawals has been a new opportunity for his influence to grow.”
Even the secretary of Russia’s security council, Nikolai Patrushev, lent credence to this narrative. “Did the fact that Afghanistan having the status of a main U.S. ally outside of NATO save the ousted pro-American regime in Kabul?” he asked in relation to Ukraine’s status as a NATO-adjacent partner. “A similar situation awaits those who are banking on America in Ukraine where neo-Nazis are capable of taking power, the country is going to disintegrate, and the White House at a certain moment won’t even remember its supporters in Kiev.”
All these comments might be, if not outright dismissed, at least compartmentalized as either statements of opinion or efforts to shape public perception. But these assessments are backed up by the timeline of events leading up to the invasion and Biden administration intelligence estimates.
Milley maintains that Moscow could not have mobilized the assets it did in the months prior to the February 24, 2022, invasion of Ukraine without prior planning. “We’re out of Afghanistan by 31 August,” he noted. Moscow began the buildup along Ukraine’s border in September 2021 under the cover of annual military exercises, which is the point at which the administration became spooked. But Moscow used the same cover story in April 2021 to conspicuously amass over 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders, and the White House didn’t regard that activity as a routine readiness exercise either. Moreover, the peaceful resolution of that standoff prior to the withdrawal from Afghanistan contrasts with the buildup that culminated in the invasion months later.
In a detailed Washington Post assessment of intelligence provided to the president in October 2021, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines reportedly characterized the April 2021 buildup as an “exercise in intimidation.” By then, however, it became increasingly clear to U.S. officials that the irregular movements of Russian forces constituted preparations for a large-scale military operation. According to the Post’s reporting, the president’s advisers concluded that Putin would invade Ukraine in a multi-axis attack, though Biden administration officials would spend the next several months insisting that they could not be certain that Putin had made a final decision.
All this proved to be true, which makes it difficult to discount the administration’s own assessment of the degree to which the Afghanistan withdrawal shaped Putin’s calculus. “The Russian leader,” the president’s intelligence analysts assessed, “believed that the Biden administration was chastened by the humiliating U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and wanted to avoid new wars.”
The administration’s experience in Afghanistan certainly informed its approach to the war in Ukraine, which White House intelligence officials believed would culminate in the fall of Kyiv within days of the Russian attack. As late as July 4, 2021, the State Department-run U.S. embassy in Kabul insisted that there were “no plans to close the embassy,” and “well-developed security plans to safely protect our personnel & facilities” were in place. Six weeks later, the White House was compelled to introduce 5,000 new troops to protect the civilians stranded during the withdrawal phase. The administration rushed to abandon the embassy in favor of temporary accommodations inside Kabul’s civilian airport.
With that experience in mind, the Biden administration didn’t wait to evacuate the diplomatic mission from Kyiv even before the shooting had started. “In Ukraine, we decided to evacuate personnel nearly two weeks before Russia’s invasion, despite concerns by some close allies, partners, and the Ukrainians themselves that doing so would undermine confidence in Ukraine,” one White House document chronicled. “This decision resulted in an orderly departure and enabled our teams to safely carry out critical functions remotely for nearly three months.” Given events in Kabul, the White House’s proactivity is understandable. But it’s also not hard to see why such a hasty contingency would ratify Vladimir Putin’s belief that the United States was a spent force either incapable of or unwilling to commit resources to Ukraine’s defense.
While none but Vladimir Putin and his inner circle could know the full extent to which Biden’s performance in Afghanistan influenced the Kremlin’s thinking, the preponderance of available evidence suggests NATO’s botched and bloody retreat from Central Asia did contribute to Moscow’s conclusion that the risks of an invasion would not outweigh the rewards. Multiple factors contributed to the breakdown of deterrence on the European continent, of which the West’s inglorious conduct in Afghanistan was only one. But there can be no doubt that it factored into the Kremlin’s decision to pull the trigger on the invasion of Ukraine, the administration’s facile protests to the contrary notwithstanding.