In Afghanistan three years ago today, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris completed what was arguably the most ignominious capitulation in U.S. history. Harris still defends her administration’s handling of the debacle, but a review of its particulars is in order. The details inspire no confidence in Harris’s judgment on matters diplomatic and military.
Harris once boasted she was the “last person in the room” with Biden when he decided to set a specific date for the withdrawal of all U.S. personnel and was “comfortable” with it. This was to associate herself publicly with the decision and to suggest that she was influential or instrumental in making it happen. Just this week she called it “the courageous and right decision.”
It is as appalling that she should still think so as it is that she should have helped execute such an ignominious debacle.
Former President George W. Bush took his eye off Afghanistan, former President Barack Obama was harmfully irresolute on that war, and former President Donald Trump made what even most of his own supporters at the time described as unwarranted concessions to the brutes of the Taliban. But none of that falls to the awful level of decision-making and incompetence of the current administration.
Biden and Harris had half a year to get things right, but they took the wrong actions at every turn.
Unlike Trump, Biden had access to the final report of the Afghanistan Study Group, an impressively bipartisan and distinguished collection of experts, who two weeks into Biden’s term urged that he not set a specific date for the mission’s end and that the U.S. keep a “long-term … counterterrorism force” there. The group said the mission was accomplishing important objectives, and it recommended a continuing force of 5,000 U.S. military personnel. It warned that withdrawal would probably lead to outright Taliban supremacy in the country, with awful repercussions. Biden ignored that and also ignored intelligence warnings of looming catastrophe. Despite his claims to the contrary, his military leaders testified almost immediately after the withdrawal that they had directly advised Biden against it.
Even with a complete termination, Biden could have secured the evacuation of nonmilitary personnel and Afghan allies before drawing down troop levels to the point where they could not defend themselves. The actual conduct of the withdrawal was as near to being criminally incompetent as it is possible to imagine. Observers repeatedly implored Biden to begin voluntary expatriation of tens of thousands of Afghan friends of freedom, but he didn’t. Likewise with the 18,000 nonmilitary Western contractors there, up to 11,000 of whom were left at least temporarily, and dangerously, stranded.
The dereliction of planning was so great that the U.S. government was forced to send fleeing allies an urgent and feckless message saying “please be advised that the United States government cannot guarantee your security” en route to the airport.
Biden arguably should have kept the modern and well-equipped Bagram Air Base permanently operational as a front-line fortress and intelligence-gathering hub against terrorism. At least he should not have abandoned Bagram a month before completing overall withdrawal — and without alerting the legitimate Afghan government. He at least should have maintained it at nearly full strength until the end to help guarantee a safe transition rather than making the chaotic and bloody exit we all saw to America’s shame on TV. The chaos allowed Taliban fighters to capture 650,000 weapons. A suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport killed 13 American service members and 170 Afghans.
Three years later, the consequences of Biden’s catastrophic retreat still ripple into the future. The Taliban have restored their safe haven for al Qaeda and its terrorism. Al Qaeda’s leader is so confident in his perch that this summer he invited foreign fighters to train with his group. ISIS-K, while an enemy of the Taliban, continues to use Afghanistan as a safe haven, and the group has infiltrated terrorists into the U.S.
From a humanitarian standpoint, everybody from the United Nations to Human Rights Watch to the Council on Foreign Relations agrees with conservative critics that Afghanistan is a disaster, with its economy destroyed, malnutrition rampant for its 16 million people, life expectancy dropping precipitously, Shariah brutally enforced with multitudinous public floggings and executions, and women hideously maltreated.
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That’s not to mention the signal of American weakness sent by Biden’s bugout, with most reasonable analysts saying it emboldened Russia, China, and Iran and its proxies to ramp up aggression against the free world.
The Biden-Harris handling of Afghanistan three years ago, which Harris still vapidly embraces, was an unmitigated calamity. For the Democratic presidential nominee to defend it even now is unforgivable.