Biden’s Afghanistan Decision. For many years I did not believe that I would live to see another American conflict that would last as long as Vietnam. Unfortunately, I did. President Bush’s initial decision to commit the US to Afghanistan without a clear exit strategy led to mission creep and an open-ended, quixotic attempt at nation-state building. Despite initially defeating the Taliban and helping to install a new government, the evidence is clear that the Taliban began regaining ground as early as 2004 and had made substantial gains by 2009. The number of US troops in the country peaked at more than 100,000 in 2011. It was that year that President Obama began a drawdown of US troops. Vice-President Biden unsuccessfully attempted to convince President Obama to pull all of our troops out of the conflict after Bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011 (Afghanistan time). In 2013 the Afghan military assumed control over all military and security operations and NATO officially ended its combat mission in December of 2014. The Taliban controlled one third of the country at the beginning of the Trump administration and there were approximately 8,400 US troops in the country. With Trump’s executive order on September 24, 2017, his closest adviser, Stephen Miller, began to actively obstruct the ability of those in Afghanistan who had helped our military forces to receive special immigrant visas (SIVs). Miller did everything he could to prevent them from coming to this country. In 2017 more than 4,000 SIVs were processed and by 2020 less than 1,800 were processed. By the beginning of 2021 the wait time for an SIV was 703 days.
Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump either ignored or allowed the Pakistani Army, its Inter Service Intelligence Directorate (ISI), and the Haqqani Network to provide financial and logistical support to the Taliban. This has played a major role in the increasing strength of the Taliban. By January 2019 the Taliban controlled one half of the country and their offensive continued despite the harsh winter. At the same time, the Trump administration was negotiating with the Taliban an agreement that would enable a complete US withdrawal. In the February 2020 agreement, President Trump committed to pulling all of our troops out by May of 2021. He released 5,000 Taliban from prisons and drew down the number of US troops to 2,500 while failing to collect US military equipment on the ground. The Taliban agreed to not use violence against any US troops as long as all were out of the country by May of 2021. President Biden, following up on his campaign promise, made the decision that it was time to get out and he did. While some of his military advisers recommended keeping 2,500 US troops in Afghanistan to support the Afghani government, they all noted that these troops would come under fire from the Taliban after May 1 and many more US troops would be necessary in the future. The troops would be in an unstable, war environment. Biden would not accept this.
As the US pull-out accelerated with the decision to leave Bagram air base by July, the Taliban advance increased dramatically. Some Afghani troops that we had trained were already putting down their arms and leaving the country, especially those fighting in the north who fled to Tajikistan. The Taliban entered Kabul on August 15 as President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. It is important to note that the documented, massive corruption of Afghanistan Presidents Hamid Karzai (2002-2014) and Ashraf Ghani (2014-2021) fueled by two trillion US dollars coming into the country over 20 years was essentially tolerated by Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump. It is also important to note that the Afghanistan Papers revealed in 2019 that US military officials in private had said all along that the Afghani government and military were not self-sustainable and the war was unwinnable, despite the continued message to the American people of progress and success.
I seem to be one of the few who believes it was the right decision and that Biden deserves credit rather than the blame he has received from some of the officials from the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, many media outlets, some former military officials and soldiers who served in Afghanistan, and much of the American public. He did the right thing as far as I am concerned and he should receive praise for the remarkable withdrawal of more than 120,000 civilians in a little more than 2 weeks while he currently works with the Taliban to ensure that any remaining Americans and those Afghanis who worked with the US are able to leave.
How quickly we forget our chaotic withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975 and the large numbers of Vietnamese who helped us who were left behind and had to find their own way to the US. At the time, there was little criticism directed toward President Ford. He made little mention of the chaotic withdrawal in April of that year. There were no calls for his resignation or impeachment. There was no uproar to save those who had helped us. There were few, if any, references to the vast amount of military equipment left in country. The US government ignored the massive corruption of various government leaders in South Vietnam. The Pentagon Papers revealed in 1971 that our government had not been truthful to the American public with respect to our “success” in Vietnam and that leaders and military officials believed the war was unwinnable as early as 1967. Public opinion turned against the war after the Tet Offensive and eventually we decided to turn the war over to the South Vietnamese and leave. There was a simultaneous winding down of support and commitment to the South Vietnamese government. Military support came to an end in January 1975 followed by a renewed offensive by the North Vietnamese forces and the Viet Cong in March 1975 followed by a rapid collapse of the government and an evacuation. The few pictures of panicked people running to the US embassy in Saigon hoping to escape the country via helicopters symbolized the chaotic ending. Tens of thousands were left behind. Afghanistan is simply a replay of Vietnam except for communications and pictures that allowed us to watch the chaos unfold in real time. The fact is that when a country loses a war or a conflict, there is no orderly exit possible.
While Afghanistan remains important in the continued war against terrorism, our dramatically improved abilities in monitoring international terrorist groups since 2001 will continue to serve us well after we leave and one should remember that since 2011 the greatest terrorist threats to the US are from right wing domestic groups (FBI reports). Afghanistan does not warrant the vast amount of resources that we were pouring into the country. Beyond the issues of terrorism, support for Israel, and the Iranian nuclear threat, the entire Middle East region including Afghanistan needs to be de-emphasized in terms of our strategic global interests. Please note that de-emphasis does not mean ignore.
President Obama attempted to make the pivot to the most strategic geopolitical area in the world today and for the future, the Pacific Rim, via his Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). The Pacific Rim is the fastest growing economic region in the world representing more than 40 percent of the global GNP. In the Pacific Rim we face a strategic and growing economic penetration and military positioning by China. The TPP set labor standards, environmental standards, intellectual property rights, and uniform trade regulations among its members. Yet, more importantly it strategically represented a united Pacific Rim alliance which when merged with APEC and ASEAN would force China to play by our economic rules in the region, not its own. The TPP coupled with greater cooperation among the APEC and ASEAN countries would have provided a united front to counter strategic Chinese political and military moves, especially in the South China Sea.
Unfortunately, the isolationist and mercantilist Trump administration dumped the TPP and left the region open to Chinese economic and military penetration and expansion in the form of its New Silk Road and Digital Silk Road Initiatives. This represents dramatic Chinese investment in these countries consisting of traditional infrastructure, telecommunications networks, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. It includes an increase in promoting Chinese media and culture in the region. In addition, China has expanded its military capabilities with more ships, anti-ship missile capabilities, nuclear submarines, and artificial islands in the South China Sea. This Pacific Rim is where the struggle for global dominance and hegemony in the 21rst century will take place. It is time to reprioritize our strategic interests and President Biden’s nuclear submarine deal with Australia is a step in that direction. Afghanistan, in and of itself, is no longer a primary strategic interest. Again, I state that this does not mean Afghanistan should be ignored.
Comments