Condoleezza Rice
It didn’t have to happen this way. The images of Afghans hanging from American transport planes at the Kabul airport are heartbreaking and harrowing. That this moment comes less than one month from the 20th anniversary of 9/11 is hard to believe and harder to accept.
The past years in Afghanistan have been difficult for every president, our armed forces, our allies and our country. The sacrifices of those who served — and those who died — will forever sear our national memory.
Each of us who held positions of authority over those years made mistakes — not because we didn’t try or were heedless of the challenges. But the United States could not afford to ignore the rogue state that harbored those who attacked us on 9/11. The time will come to assess where we failed — and what we achieved.
In the wake of Kabul’s fall, though, a corrosive and deeply unfair narrative is emerging: to blame the Afghans for how it all ended. The Afghan security forces failed. The Afghan government failed. The Afghan people failed. “We gave them every chance to determine their own future,” President Biden said in his address Monday — as if the Afghans had somehow chosen the Taliban.
No — they didn’t choose the Taliban. They fought and died alongside us, helping us degrade al-Qaeda. Working with the Afghans and our allies, we gained time to build a counterterrorism presence around the world and a counterterrorism apparatus at home that has kept us safe. In the end, the Afghans couldn’t hold the country without our airpower and our support. It is not surprising that Afghan security forces lost the will to fight, when the Taliban warned that the United States was deserting them and that those who resisted would see their families killed.
No — they didn’t choose the Taliban. They seized the chance to create a modern society where girls could attend school, women could enter professions and human rights would be respected.
No — they didn’t choose the Taliban. They built a fledgling democracy with elected leaders who often failed but didn’t brutalize their people as so many regimes in the region do. It was a government that never managed to tame corruption and the drug trade. In this, Afghanistan had plenty of company across the globe.
Twenty years was not enough to complete a journey from the 7th-century rule of the Taliban and a 30-year civil war to a stable government. Twenty years may also not have been enough to consolidate our gains against terrorism and assure our own safety. We — and they — needed more time.
The Taliban’s past rule over Afghanistan is why many fear for human rights
We have understood this before. Technically, our longest war is not Afghanistan: It is Korea. That war didn’t end in victory; it ended in a stalemate — an armistice. South Korea did not achieve democracy for decades. Seventy years later, we have more than 28,000 American troops there in an admission that even the sophisticated South Korean army cannot deter the North alone. Here’s what we achieved: a stable equilibrium on the Korean Peninsula, a valuable South Korean ally and a strong presence in the Indo-Pacific.
Afghanistan is not South Korea. But we might have achieved a reasonable outcome with a far smaller commitment. More time for the Afghans didn’t have to entail combat troops, just a core American presence for training, air support and intelligence.
More time for us might have retained American intelligence and counterterrorism assets on the ground to protect our allies and our homeland from the reemergence of a terrorist haven. More time might have preserved our sophisticated Bagram air base in the middle of a dangerous region that includes Pakistan and borders the most dangerous country in the Middle East — Iran.
More time would have served our strategic interests.
We did not want to give ourselves or the Afghans more time. Understood. But we were in such a hurry that we left in the middle of the fighting season. We know that the Taliban retreats in the winter. Might we have waited until then and given the Afghans a little more time to develop a strategy to prevent the chaotic fall of Kabul?
Now we have to live with the consequences of our haste.
We must do everything we can to mobilize regional allies and the international community to temper the nature of Taliban rule. Let us hope that Taliban leaders mean it when they say they will not brutalize the population as they did before.
Meantime, the administration cannot simply state that our credibility is intact — it is not. Credibility is not divisible, and China, Russia and Iran have taken our measure. The pictures of the past few days will emblazon an image of America in retreat. Now is the time to reinforce our commitment to Ukraine, Iraq and particularly Taiwan.
And as we relive the fall of Saigon, there is one page that is worth repeating. We rescued thousands of South Vietnamese who had helped us and were endangered. We did not get them all, and many suffered at the hands of the North. But the ones we did relocate, their children and grandchildren, contribute daily to strengthening the fabric of America. They are businesspeople, educators, government officials — and soldiers in the American armed forces who enlisted after 9/11.
If we do nothing else, we must urgently provide refuge for the Afghans who believed in us. We must demonstrate that we still believe in them.
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