When President Joe Biden ordered U.S. forces home from Afghanistan, he and his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, assured us that the withdrawal would be a net positive for the United States. Not only would it end the country’s longest war, “it had to come to an end,” Sullivan told the Aspen Security Forum, but Washington, D.C., would also risk nothing as it could conduct counterterrorism from afar.
Announcing the end of the war on Aug. 31, 2021, Biden explained, “We will maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries. We just don’t need to fight a ground war to do it. We have what’s called over-the-horizon capabilities, which means we can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground.”
Biden always exaggerated the efficacy of over-the-horizon counterterrorism. There is a limit to what satellites can do. Absent the ability to develop intelligence on land, the United States operates half-blind.
Addressing the nation on July 24 to announce the end of his reelection campaign, Biden bragged, “I’m the first president in this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world.”
Some questioned whether Biden’s statement meant he forgot about anti-Houthi efforts, but they missed something as important: Biden was essentially signaling an end to counterterrorism efforts over Afghanistan.
Late last month, Mullah Yaqoob, the eldest son of Taliban founder Mullah Omar and the group’s defense chief since 2020, told officials in Kabul the Taliban would soon take control of Afghanistan’s airspace. Practically speaking, a transfer could not happen per the White House’s disagreement, but it appears Biden, Sullivan, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken chose not to object.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the former Trump and Biden administration special envoy for Afghanistan, spread the fiction that the Taliban had changed. No longer was it the group that sheltered al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and allowed him to plan the 9/11 attacks from their territory. Instead, the Taliban version 2.0 could be counterterrorism partners that would work with the U.S. to defeat other threats such as the Islamic State-Khorasan. It was always snake oil.
Now, a July 28 document bearing Yaqoob’s signature shows just how naive any trust in the Taliban was. Yaqoob’s memo references assistance he sought successfully from China to activate an anti-drone system to neutralize U.S. drones. Chinese officials now work with the Taliban to install the system at the Bagram Air Base. The former U.S. base abandoned to the Taliban on Biden’s orders now supposedly hosts People’s Liberation Army personnel and Chinese intelligence officers.
As the Biden administration winds down, its legacy is returning Afghanistan fully to the pre-9/11 era: The Taliban train terrorists and plot against the U.S. Former Democratic Texas Rep. Charlie Wilson helped the Mujahedin drive the Soviets out. He then lamented that D.C. turned its back on Afghanistan. Biden now repeats the mistake of former President Bill Clinton. He embraces an out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach to Afghanistan.
The only difference between then and now is that the U.S. and United Nations today subsidize the Taliban, enabling it more easily to divert funds to Beijing and defeat what little U.S. counterterrorism exists.
When the U.S. abandoned Afghanistan, the White House essentially promised the U.S. had succeeded in its mission to neutralize the Taliban and al Qaeda threat.
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“We succeeded in what we set out to do in Afghanistan over a decade ago,” Biden explained nearly three years ago. “Then we stayed for another decade.”
Too bad Biden’s real legacy is returning Afghanistan wholly to the pre-9/11 era.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.