Friday Talking Points -- War's End

[ChrisWeigant]

This has been a rather historic week, so we are dispensing with our regular format to spend our entire column discussing the withdrawal of United States military forces from Afghanistan, and the emergency airlift operation now being undertaken to get every American and every interpreter and translator and other Afghan ally of ours out as well.

"Historic," of course, is a neutral term. It can be positive or negative -- it really just means "we will remember this time in the future for what just happened." To put this another way: Barack Obama winning the presidency was historic, but then the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in January was also historic, for very different reasons.

So we won't be presenting our usual awards or offering up our usual spin. Instead we're going to take a sober look at where we are now, how we got here, what mistakes were made, and how President Joe Biden has been handling it all so far.

We will return to our regular Friday Talking Points column format next week, we promise.



The Bitter End

Whether President Joe Biden wants it to or not, this week will go down in history filed right next to the week of April 30, 1975 -- the date Saigon fell. The photos of helicopters taking off from the roof of the Saigon embassy will be contrasted with the photos of people falling off a transport plane as it leaves the Kabul airport -- because they were so desperate to leave, they suicidally clung to the side of the plane as it taxied. The two will forever be linked, under the subject heading: "This is what it looks like when America loses a war."

Nobody likes to lose, Americans more than most. But lose we did. We expended an enormous amount of (as they used to say) "blood and treasure," and here at the end of the entire experience we really don't have a whole lot to show for it. When we arrived, the Taliban was in complete control. Before we're even completely gone, the Taliban is back in complete control. They swear they've changed, but no one in their right mind truly believes that.

Right after September 11, 2001, the Taliban reportedly tried to contact us to offer a deal: they would help us hunt down Osama Bin Laden. We could have cooperated with them and perhaps brought him to justice years before a special-teams raid killed him. We could have avoided not only the war in Afghanistan but also the war in Iraq as well. We would have saved trillions of dollars, and many thousand American soldiers -- as well as uncountable thousands of civilians and enemy soldiers -- would still be alive as well. The whole thing could have been over in months, or perhaps a year or two (at most). Saddam Hussein and the Taliban would have retained control of their countries, but this would have avoided other things such as the Islamic State taking over their "caliphate."

Hindsight is always 20/20. It's easy to look back and see where we could have chosen a much different route and had much different results. It wasn't so easy at the time, when the American people were thirsty for revenge and looking for a convenient target to vent their rage upon. Speaking out against the first war (in Afghanistan) was considered tantamount to treason, at the time. Speaking out against Iraq was slightly less contentious, but not by much. We had to take the fight "to the terrorists" so we could fight them "over there, not here at home."

That was all 20 years ago. This week marked the end of America's longest war -- so long it took on the label of the "Forever War." And it wasn't an easy thing to see. President Biden was convinced (assumably, by his military and intelligence advisors) that the Taliban would take a minimum -- a minimum, mind you -- of six months to consolidate control over the entire country and win their civil war. The paper tiger of the Afghan military forces was taken at face value and it was assumed that even though they might be doomed to fail that they'd put up a good fight and at least provide a buffer period so America could take its leisurely time about getting all of its citizens, soldiers, and in-country allies out through a thoughtful and systematic process. After all, we had six whole months to achieve it, so there was no overwhelming hurry to even begin.

The soldiers (except for around 600 of them, who would be left to guard the U.S. Embassy) would go first, according to the arrangement with the Taliban that was originally struck by Donald Trump. They'd all be out by the 20th anniversary of 9/11, a convenient milestone on the calendar. Then all the Americans and our Afghan interpreters and other allies could leave in an orderly fashion, over the next few months.

That was the plan, at any rate.

It was woefully inadequate. It was tragically optimistic. It was the recipe for the disaster we have all seen unfold in Kabul, all week long.

This was a massive failure, and it was so big there's plenty of blame to go around. It was, first and foremost, a failure of intelligence. Some people in Afghanistan (including some State Department employees) were warning of the imminency of disaster, many weeks ago. Their voices were either not heard or not believed. Instead, as Biden characterizes it, the "overwhelming consensus" among his advisors were that the Taliban would not take over the country for anywhere from six to twelve months. One week before the fall of Kabul -- even with the Taliban rolling up the entire countryside in classic blitzkrieg fashion -- the consensus only changed to "perhaps Kabul will fall, but it will take at least 90 days, no need to panic." One week before it fell, that was the official government line. Still later, this shrank to "perhaps 30 days," but it never even approached the reality of what was about to take place. The intelligence on the developing situation in Afghanistan was a monumental failure, plain and simple.

Some have been saying the decision to pull all our troops out was another failure. But there really was little else we could do after Trump signed a deal with the Taliban (one in which we released 5,000 Taliban prisoners to them) to do exactly that. So if you do argue the pullout was a failure, that one has to land at Trump's feet.

It was a failure to act swiftly and decisively, and that is largely Biden's fault. To his credit, when the inevitable became obvious, Biden did send in thousands of troops as quickly as he could -- more than had actually been in Afghanistan for a while, in fact. If they hadn't been en route and already arriving, things might have turned out even worse (if, for instance, the Taliban had taken control of the Kabul airport).

But the real failure to act came months earlier. Why would you pull all the soldiers out before evacuating everyone else, after all? Why wouldn't you start the civilian evacuation a lot sooner? Perhaps not the embassy, but the Americans living in the country and all the interpreters and translators and other support staff that have helped America throughout the past 20 years all should have at least begun the process of getting out. This didn't really happen at all. According to Biden, this was at the request of the Afghan government, who "didn't want to cause a panic" among their own population.

This was a critical mistake. It was compounded by the fact that the Trump administration had essentially broken the bureaucratic process to certify translators and all the rest for a "Special Immigrant Visa," or "S.I.V." The backlog and glacial pace of getting these visas was a problem that really should have been fixed months ago -- but was not. The processing did not speed up in an appreciable way even after Biden took over. This was a failure that many Afghan allies may pay for with their lives. And now we are (according to reporters actually on the ground) pretty much flying planeloads of people out and it now seems that the only real criteria for boarding one of those planes is physically getting to the Kabul airport (one reporter noted that a planeload of unaccompanied children had just made it out, and it is highly doubtful they all had the proper paperwork and visas. This was a failure of organization, and a perhaps-lethal failure of too much red tape.

Whether you agree or disagree with the overall goal of fully withdrawing our military after 20 long years of war in Afghanistan or not, we can all pretty much agree that this was not the way it should have happened. We got caught with our pants down. We looked foolishly naive. We were unprepared for the worst case scenario, perhaps because those who make and advise such decisions were loath to admit they had gotten it wrong. Even right up to the end, they predicted a laughable 90 days of safety ahead. In reality, this lasted a little more than 90 hours. That's a failure that can be chalked up to sheer American hubris, most likely (these sorts of details will doubtlessly be revealed in time).

The biggest failure, of course, happened at the very start. As one very sage piece in the Washington Post put it:

Afghanistan may have fallen, but the delusions and deceptions that brought the United States to this day have not. While some would like to blame this tragedy on military decisions, or on intelligence failures, or on Afghans themselves, or on President Biden -- the fourth president to preside over the disaster -- the roots lie deep in the ideology we have been taught and retaught over decades.

Just as before, there will be an effort to unlearn Afghanistan's lessons so its mistakes can be repeated.

That ideology is about what the United States does and represents to the world. It says that we can accomplish anything, including remolding other countries in our image. It says not only that our motives are always pure but that even when we are breaking down doors and raining down bombs, those on the other end will crawl from the rubble of their homes and thank us for delivering them "freedom."

. . .

These wars, their promoters assured us, would not only bring the blessings of liberty to the lands we invaded, they would set off a cascade of freedom spreading from one country to another until much of the world rested comfortably in our beneficent shadow.

That was the plan, at any rate. It was doomed to failure from the start, and it dragged on for far too long. And, as usual, the American people were continually lied to about the reality of the situation in Afghanistan, throughout the entire conflict. President Biden is right about one thing -- this was always going to be a very bitter end, no matter when it took place.



President Biden's response

If we were handing out awards this week, we would have to give both the "most impressive" and "most disappointing" awards to President Biden. His response to the crisis has been very last-minute and ad hoc, but so far he has avoided total disaster (he keeps pointing out not a single American has been killed in the evacuation yet -- which is a pretty low bar -- but it does remind everyone that things could have been even worse).

Throughout it all, Biden has remained adamant about fully withdrawing our forces, no matter how messy the situation has gotten. He put a statement out last weekend where he made his case:

When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor -- which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019 -- that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on U.S. Forces. Shortly before he left office, he also drew U.S. Forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500. Therefore, when I became President, I faced a choice -- follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our Forces and our allies' Forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country's civil conflict. I was the fourth President to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan -- two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.

Another president might have backed down from this, as things headed south. Biden didn't. His view is that it was always going to be chaotic to pull out, and it would have been chaotic no matter when it happened:

One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country. And an endless American presence in the middle of another country's civil conflict was not acceptable to me.

Biden's been making this case for a while. From a speech he gave last month:

So let me ask those who wanted us to stay: How many more -- how many thousands more of America's daughters and sons are you willing to risk? How long would you have them stay? Already we have members of our military whose parents fought in Afghanistan 20 years ago. Would you send their children and their grandchildren as well? Would you send your own son or daughter?

Fully owning the core withdrawal decision is impressive, which is why we have to credit Biden for his resolute insistence on achieving his goal of total military withdrawal, even in the face of scathing criticism and disastrous execution. Once the civilian evacuation is complete (whenever that happens), one assumes that those 6,000 American soldiers will turn out the lights, board the last planes out, and exit the Afghanistan stage for good.

But President Biden has also been pretty disappointing, too. His rosy-tinted predictions were not only proven tragically wrong, they exposed how dangerously incompetent the assumptions behind Biden's plan of action truly were. At the start of July, Biden confidently predicted: "There's going to be no circumstance when you're going to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy. It is not at all comparable [to Saigon].... The likelihood there's going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely." And then we saw precisely those things occur. The most egregious misread of the situation was that "90 days" prediction -- even when the chaos was fast approaching, the U.S. government was still blithely assuring everyone that there was plenty of time -- no need to panic or speed up the withdrawal plans or anything like that.

President Biden has now addressed the country twice this week on Afghanistan, once on Monday and then again earlier today. In both appearances, Biden seems at least partly in a state of denial about just how bad the situation has gotten. The closest he got to admitting how flat-footed he was caught was:

There was only the cold reality of either following through on the agreement [negotiated by Donald Trump and the Taliban] to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, lurching into the third decade of conflict.

I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I've learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces.

That's why we were still there. We were clear-eyed about the risks. We planned for every contingency.

But I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you. The truth is: This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.

Towards the end of his address, Biden forcefully tried to take responsibility:

I'm now the fourth American President to preside over war in Afghanistan -- two Democrats and two Republicans. I will not pass this responsibly on -- responsibility on to a fifth President.

I will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little more time in Afghanistan will make all the difference. Nor will I shrink from my share of responsibility for where we are today and how we must move forward from here.

I am President of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me.

However, this would have been a stronger line if Biden hadn't already passed quite a few bucks earlier on in his remarks. This began with a blunt summation: "Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight."

Biden later returned to this theme:

There's some very brave and capable Afghan special forces units and soldiers, but if Afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance to the Taliban now, there is no chance that 1 year -- 1 more year, 5 more years, or 20 more years of U.S. military boots on the ground would've made any difference.

And here's what I believe to my core: It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan's own armed forces would not. If the political leaders of Afghanistan were unable to come together for the good of their people, unable to negotiate for the future of their country when the chips were down, they would never have done so while U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan bearing the brunt of the fighting for them.

Biden also placed the blame with the Afghan government, who seemed to have a better withdrawal plan than we did -- they fled the country before the chaos in Kabul even arrived. Biden pointed out they had previously given assurances that they just could not back up:

When I hosted President Ghani and Chairman Abdullah at the White House in June and again when I spoke by phone to Ghani in July, we had very frank conversations. We talked about how Afghanistan should prepare to fight their civil wars after the U.S. military departed, to clean up the corruption in government so the government could function for the Afghan people. We talked extensively about the need for Afghan leaders to unite politically.

They failed to do any of that.

I also urged them to engage in diplomacy, to seek a political settlement with the Taliban. This advice was flatly refused. Mr. Ghani insisted the Afghan forces would fight, but obviously he was wrong.

But the most tone-deaf part came when Biden addressed why the evacuation didn't start a lot sooner:

I know that there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghans -- civilians sooner. Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier -- still hopeful for their country. And part of it was because the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, "a crisis of confidence."

But as the president of the United States, Biden should have placed the safety of Americans far above domestic political troubles for the Afghan government. Undoubtedly it would have caused a crisis of confidence and even a widespread panic. But is that any worse than what we are seeing now? This was really Biden's weakest buck-passing of them all. At least slamming the Afghan army and government was based on conditions completely beyond Biden's control. But the timing and pace of the withdrawal is really his to own.

In today's remarks, Biden insisted that Americans in Kabul are not having any problems getting to the airport. He stated that the Taliban had agreed to let anyone with a U.S. passport through their checkpoints, and when he took questions at the end he was directly asked about this (since we've all seen the chaos outside the airports in recent news reports). Biden insisted:

We have no indication that they haven't been able to get -- in Kabul -- through the airport. We've made an agreement with the -- with the Taliban. Thus far, they've allowed them to go through. It's in their interest for them to go through. So, we know of no circumstance where American citizens are -- carrying an American passport -- are trying to get through to the airport. But we will do whatever needs to be done to see to it they get to the airport.

Biden did refuse to pass one particular buck, to his credit. He had originally stated that everyone (all his advisors) had all been in agreement that the Taliban wouldn't take over Kabul for at least six months. But after a State Department cable was leaked, this was no longer "operative" (as they say in Washington). So Biden amended it a little:

No one -- I shouldn't say "no one" -- the consensus was that it was highly unlikely that in 11 days they'd collapse and fall, and the leader of Afghanistan would flee the country.

Later, Biden tried to more fully own the error of believing this consensus opinion (when asked directly about the State Department cable, which was sent to express the opinion that the Taliban was going to move a lot faster than Washington believed):

We've got all kind of cables, all kinds of advice. If you notice, it ranged from this group saying that -- they didn't say it'd fall when it would fall -- when it did fall -- but saying that it would fall; to others saying it wouldn't happen for a long time and they'd be able to sustain themselves through the end of the year.

I made the decision. The buck stops with me. I took the consensus opinion. The consensus opinion was that, in fact, it would not occur, if it occurred, until later in the year. So, it was my decision.

This was a bad decision, plain and simple. It's painfully obvious how wrong it was. And this is what Biden hasn't fully copped to quite yet -- the fact that if the "consensus opinion" had been more pessimistic (or, as it turned out, "realistic" ), then the evacuation plans would doubtlessly have been better. A blitzkrieg was never planned for, and yet it happened all the same. That's a pretty big planning error to make, and it is at the heart of all the rest of the chaos we now see nightly on our television screens.



Conclusions

Biden seems to be gambling on a few benchmarks that will be true right up until they are not. The first is "all Americans are being let through the Taliban checkpoints." All it will take is one person taken prisoner by the Taliban or one person shot dead, and this will be chalked up as a failure for Biden.

Which brings us to the second one -- the fact that (so far) no American has died in the chaos. Again, this will be true right up until it isn't.

To be fair, though, the news media lives a little too much in the moment, without ever considering a slightly longer viewpoint. The fact is that we have not so far abandoned our allies in Afghanistan. We are still there, and the evacuation airlift is underway in a big way now. We have the capability to get people out, and we have a shaky agreement with the Taliban that they'll allow us to do so.

But even if Biden's right about Americans being able to get to the airport, what is missing in all of this is any assurance that our Afghan allies will also be able to get to the airport. The Taliban has not agreed to any sort of thing. They are the ones being turned away by these checkpoints. They are the ones being systematically hunted and rounded up by the Taliban. They are the ones who are too fearful to even attempt to make it to the airport.

And, so far, we just don't have any answer on how things are supposed to work out for them at all. Biden was directly asked this by a reporter from PBS: "are you considering rescue operations to recover Americans and Afghan allies stuck behind Taliban checkpoints?"

Biden answered: "The last answer is yes -- to the last question. We’re considering every opportunity and every means by which we can get folks to the airport." But you really have to wonder how true that is, and Biden didn't say he would help Afghans get to the airport, he just said he's "considering" it. That's not very reassuring to them, to be blunt.

The hard reality is that this situation with Taliban checkpoints would not have even arisen if the U.S. had gotten all the translators and other allies out of Afghanistan long before now. Most of them have been waiting a very long time to get permission to come to America -- waiting on an endless amount of paperwork, red tape, and bureaucratic delays. If that problem had been solved months ago, then the current predicament would never have even happened.

The verdict of history really still hangs in the balance, though. If the rest of the evacuation and airlift goes a lot more smoothly and the stories of people not being able to get out stay at an absolute minimum, then Biden could emerge from this in a whole lot better political shape than may even seem possible, right now. But if anything goes wrong with this plan in any major way, then Biden will indeed own a lot of the failure. He already owns the fact that it happened on his watch, but if he manages the next few weeks perfectly, then perhaps the public will wind up agreeing with his basic premise: this was always going to be chaotic, that's why other presidents didn't have the guts to do it, and better it be done now (chaos and all) than in one year, five years, or 15 years.

The last thing history will judge us on is whether Afghanistan returns to being a terrorist safe haven or not. Biden is putting a lot of stock in the plan to manage this from "over the horizon" (a favorite phrase of his in all this), much like we do in places like Yemen. If this works as designed, then Biden will be able to look back and know he was right to get all our soldiers out as soon as possible. But if a group like Al Qaeda sets up shop in Afghanistan with the Taliban's blessing, then the hawkish argument for extending the Forever War for another few decades might sound a lot more reasonable.

No matter what happens, it's going to take more time to properly evaluate the end of the Afghanistan war -- for Joe Biden, for America's interests, and for the Afghanistan people. Please keep that in mind as you follow the minute-by-minute story over the next few weeks.




Chris Weigant blogs at: ChrisWeigant.com
Follow Chris on Twitter: ChrisWeigant
Full archives of FTP columns: FridayTalkingPoints.com

[brush]

1. I wouldn't say we lost. We chased Al Queda out of the country...

Last edited Fri Aug 20, 2021, 11:20 PM - Edit history (1)

then later got Bin Ladin. Both successful completions of mission Then was the time to leave but no president would do it until Biden. The withdrawal is a mess that's for sure.

But one thing not mentioned much is trump's agreement to withdraw was in Feb. of 2020, and the date set was for May 2021. trump had 15 months to prepare for withdrawal and did nothing.

When Biden won it got dumped in his lap as the Afghan president fled the country with millions crammed in his baggage and the Afghan army laid down didn't do anything so it all gets blamed on Biden.

Typical. The MSM goes on a feeding frenzy against Biden without analizing trump's role and failure to do anything.

[flying rabbit]

2. K&R. nt