Susan B. Glasser
At least Joe Biden is owning it. “I do not regret my decision,” the President said this week, as provincial capital after provincial capital in Afghanistan fell to the Taliban while the Afghan government—propped up by two decades of U.S. support—looked soon to suffer its long-predicted post-American collapse. “Afghan leaders have to come together. We lost thousands—lost to death and injury—thousands of American personnel. They’ve got to fight for themselves, fight for their nation,” Biden said on Tuesday, making it as clear as he could that he would not revisit his decision to pull out. America is finally, definitively, done with the war in Afghanistan after two decades, never mind the consequences.
The words from the Biden Administration in the face of this unfolding disaster have been strikingly cold. Biden himself, normally the most empathetic of politicians, did not address the predictable and predicted human tragedy that his April decision to withdraw the roughly thirty-five hundred U.S. troops remaining in Afghanistan has now unleashed. The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, followed his comments by blaming the Afghan military, which the U.S. funded, trained, equipped, and built over twenty years, for its fate. “They have what they need,” she said. “What they need to determine is if they have the political will to fight back.” The State Department, for its part, put out the word that it was making a last-ditch diplomatic push to convince the Taliban that their government will be an international pariah if they take over the country by force. Does anyone think that will stop them?
There is, quite obviously, a calculation behind all this, which is that, after all this time and with more than enough blame to go around in both parties, Biden will not suffer politically from leaving behind an unwinnable war. Put bluntly, there is a strongly held belief in Washington that Americans simply do not care what happens in Afghanistan. Poll numbers back it up. Politicians in both parties, with notable exceptions, have generally supported Biden’s decision or at least have acquiesced to it, which leaves them either to second-guess Biden’s execution or simply to say nothing at all. (Cue the second-guesser himself, Donald Trump, whose exit deal with the Taliban Biden has largely stuck with, despite the Taliban’s failure to abide by its provisions. “It should have been done much better,” Trump said in a statement on Thursday, about the withdrawal. Of course he did.)
“The general sense seems to be, ‘Hey, look, we’ve spent a lot of blood and treasure there for twenty years, we’ve done a lot, there’s a limit to what any country can do,’ ” Richard Fontaine, a former foreign-policy adviser to the late Senator John McCain who now heads the Center for a New American Security, told me. “This is tragic, but it’s not our tragedy.” While Fontaine and I were talking on Thursday, the news came from the Associated Press that Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city and the gateway to the country’s west, had fallen to the Taliban. Hours later, Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city and the birthplace of the Taliban movement, had fallen as well. Kabul, the capital, will soon be encircled by the Taliban, who in a matter of weeks have taken control of twelve of the country’s thirty-four provincial capitals. By the time you read this, that number may well be higher. On Thursday afternoon, the State Department and Pentagon announced that the U.S. military is sending in some three thousand troops to help evacuate much of the U.S. Embassy staff from Kabul. Bitter irony of ironies—that was approximately the number of U.S. troops still deployed in Afghanistan when Biden decided to pull them out and perhaps insure the government falling to the Taliban in the first place.
None of this was a surprise, despite Biden’s embarrassing comment just last month that it was “highly unlikely” the Taliban would soon be “overrunning everything and owning the whole country.” Senior U.S. government officials knew what was coming, even if they hoped for better, or at least for more time until the Taliban onslaught—akin to the “decent interval” Richard Nixon sought between his own withdrawal from Vietnam and the inevitable victory of the North over the South. They were neither “clueless” nor “delusional,” as a person who has recently spoken with Biden’s advisers about Afghanistan put it to me. To those who were paying attention, there was a grim inevitability to the week’s events. The Pentagon has warned every one of the last four Presidents that an abrupt U.S. withdrawal would lead to some version of the Afghan military debacle we are seeing this week.
Still, in the four months since Biden’s decision was announced, I have been surprised by the lack of concrete debate and discussion about what the real consequences are of the pullout. Why? It’s hard to say for sure. Political calculation by both parties is part of it, undoubtedly, as well as the all-too-pressing problem of too much else terrible going on, with American democracy in crisis and a horrible summer coronavirus surge. But events on the ground do not wait for Washington, and this is the week that the consequences have started to reveal themselves. So, the question must be, and is starting to be, asked: What will come next from this disaster?
It is much easier to neither ask nor answer that question; it is easier to keep litigating the question of who is to blame for twenty years’ and two trillion dollars’ worth of war. Over two decades, there have been many, many rounds of this: George W. Bush botching Afghanistan because he decided to invade Iraq instead. Barack Obama botching Afghanistan because he decided to surge troops but then told the Taliban exactly when he would pull them back out. By the time Trump, eager to end the war but endlessly equivocating about how to do so, made what by most accounts was a terrible deal with the Taliban, in February of 2020, the multiple crises inside the United States meant that the deal received little to no attention in a capital consumed by impeachment, a pandemic, and economic collapse.
Biden himself was long a skeptic of what could be accomplished in Afghanistan, and when Obama debated the surge in 2009, Biden was on the losing side against it. This time, he made clear to his team that he would not bow to the generals. He even kept Trump’s Taliban negotiator, the former Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, in place. In April, overriding the Pentagon recommendations and the fears of some of his advisers, Biden took the politically expedient course of declaring the “Forever War” ended on his watch. It is surely on Biden as much as on Trump how the pullout appears to have been organized: so rapidly that there were no plans in place to evacuate the twenty thousand Afghan interpreters who worked for the U.S., and without agreements secured in advance for regional bases from which to conduct the counterterrorism mission that the U.S. says it will continue. U.S. forces completed their withdrawal without major incident, but now come the urgent unanswered questions: Will the Taliban take Kabul by force? Will they march in before the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, which were planned and launched by Al Qaeda from Afghanistan, and which prompted the U.S. war there in the first place? Is there any realistic chance remaining of a negotiated settlement between the Afghan government and the Taliban to prevent such an outcome?
When I spoke with a senior Biden Administration official late Thursday, those were the questions the White House was focussing on, after a day of grim news that made clear only bad scenarios remain. “There is a totally credible possibility of some kind of deal cut here. And I think there is a totally credible possibility that the Taliban, riding high on adrenaline and momentum and whatever else they’re on, enter the city violently,” the senior official told me. “Those are both credible possibilities, and we need to be prepared for both and operating effectively on both tracks. That’s what we’re doing with our deployment, and that’s what we’re doing with our diplomacy.”
When I spoke on Thursday with experts who have decades of Afghan experience between them about the week’s events, they were contemplating even more apocalyptic scenarios for what may come. “Is this going to be Biden’s Rwanda?” asked one longtime acquaintance, whom I met in Kabul in the spring of 2002, full of determination to build a modern, functioning state out of the post-Taliban, post-9/11 rubble. Or, perhaps, “Al Qaeda/isis 3.0”? The possibilities, from large-scale human-rights atrocities to a new center for international jihadist terrorism, are bloodcurdling.
I mentioned the fear of an “Al Qaeda/isis 3.0” to Peter Bergen, the journalist and author who has just released “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” Bergen, who interviewed bin Laden in the nineteen-nineties in Afghanistan and whom I met there when I was sent by the Washington Post to cover the war in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, told me that he thought the catastrophe in Afghanistan was very similar to the isis blitzkrieg into Iraq that followed the U.S.’s 2011 withdrawal. “The movie is exactly the same movie,” he said. “It’s basically the isis playbook.” Whether and when the Taliban roll into Kabul, it’s already clear that we are looking at a renewed and violent civil war. In short, he added, “It’s a fucking mess.” Which, come to think of it, is a pretty fair epitaph for this whole sorry affair.
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