Six on History: Last 'Stan
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1) ‘Blood on his hands’: Biden under fire over collapse in Afghanistan, Washington Times
"The Biden administration on Sunday deflected blame for the rapid fallout from the U.S. troop from Afghanistan, racing to stem the political bleeding from the biggest foreign policy challenge of his young presidency.
The White House was reeling from images of U.S. diplomats and civilians scrambling to evacuate Kabul as the Taliban advanced into the Afghan capital.
The situation grew direr after reports that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had fled the country and that thousands of militants from the Islamic State group and al Qaeda had been released from prison.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday that the Biden administration was in a no-win situation because President Trump signed an agreement with the Taliban last year that set a May 1 conditions-based deadline to withdraw all remaining U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
“The fact of the matter is, had the president decided to keep forces in Afghanistan beyond May 1, attacks would have resumed on our forces,” Mr. Blinken said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “The Taliban had not been attacking our forces or NATO during the period from which the agreement was reached to May 1.
“The offensive you’re seeing across the country now to take these provincial capitals would have commenced, and we would have been back at war with the Taliban,” he said. “I would probably be on this program today explaining why we were sending tens of thousands of American forces back into Afghanistan and back to war, something the American people simply don’t support.”
Republicans said the Taliban refused to uphold their part of the peace deal, but the Biden administration nevertheless plowed ahead with the withdrawal.
“I think the secretary has been devoid of reality this whole time since the decision was made in May,” Rep. Michael T. McCaul of Texas said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I think it’s an unmitigated disaster of epic proportions.”
“This is going to be a stain on this president and his presidency, and I think he’s going to have blood on his hands for what they did,” said Mr. McCaul, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
For his part, Mr. Trump on Sunday called on Mr. Biden to resign.
“It is time for Joe Biden to resign in disgrace for what he has allowed to happen to Afghanistan, along with the tremendous surge in COVID, the Border catastrophe, the destruction of energy independence, and our crippled economy,” Mr. Trump said in one of two statements sent out early Sunday evening.
“What Joe Biden has done with Afghanistan is legendary,” he said in the other. “It will go down as one of the greatest defeats in American history!”
Rep. Liz Cheney, Wyoming Republican, said both the Biden and Trump administrations deserve blame.
“They walked down this path of legitimizing the Taliban, of perpetuating this fantasy, telling the American people that the Taliban were a partner for peace,” Ms. Cheney said on ABC’s “This Week.” “President Trump told us that the Taliban was going to fight terror. [Former Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo told us that the Taliban was going to renounce al Qaeda.”
“None of that has happened. None of it has happened,” she said.
Ms. Cheney said the deteriorating situation exposes the fallacy of campaign promises that “we’re going to end endless wars.”
“What we’re watching right now in Afghanistan is what happens when America withdraws from the world,” she said.
Mr. Pompeo, who is considering a presidential run in 2024, called attempts to blame the Trump administration “pathetic” and said the Biden administration should move to “crush” the Taliban entering Kabul.
“I can assure you if I were still secretary of state with a commander in chief like President Trump, the Taliban would have understood that there were real costs to pay if there were plots against the United States of America,” Mr. Pompeo said.
Even as the Taliban were capturing provincial capitals and other cities across Afghanistan, polls showed that most U.S. voters backed the troop withdrawal.
A Chicago Council Survey released last week found that 70% of Americans — including 77% of Democrats, 73% of independents and 56% of Republicans — agreed with removing the troops.
The unraveling situation, however, is changing the political dynamic and opening the door for Mr. Trump and others to cast the Biden administration as soft and misguided on the world stage.
“Tragic mess in Afghanistan, a completely open and broken border, crime at record levels, oil prices through the roof, inflation rising, and taken advantage of by the entire world,” Mr. Trump said in a statement Friday.
“Do you miss me yet?” He asked in all capital letters.
Looking to dull the attacks, Mr. Biden announced Saturday the deployment of about 5,000 troops to help evacuate U.S. personnel as the Taliban advanced.
He said in a statement that Mr. Trump left the Islamist group “in the strongest position militarily since 2001” when he left office and insisted that his rationale for withdrawing the U.S. military from Afghanistan was the right course.
“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,” Mr. Biden said. “An endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me.”
Republicans reminded viewers Sunday that Mr. Biden, citing the strength of Afghan security forces, slapped down the idea that a Taliban takeover was inevitable.
“You just had President Biden a few days ago saying you wouldn’t see helicopters evacuating the embassy like Saigon, and yet here we are,” said House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, Louisiana Republican. “This is President Biden’s Saigon moment, and unfortunately it was predictable.
"When the United States withdrew its last soldier from Vietnam in March of 1973, I watched the top North Vietnamese representative in Saigon present him with a little picture of Ho Chi Minh as a souvenir as he boarded the aircraft that would take him home. I remember wondering whether the South Vietnam that I had spent so long writing about would be able to survive without the Americans who had been propping it up for so many years.
I doubt the Taliban is going to give the last American solider out of Afghanistan any souvenirs, and I wonder, too, how long Afghanistan’s government can last.
Of course there are many and important differences. In Vietnam, America lost more than 50,000 troops, while the killed-in-action count in Afghanistan is nearly 2,400. And no young Americans were drafted to serve in Afghanistan. If they had been, the war would never have lasted this long. But in the main, the American effort in both wars was remarkably the same. Kabul may last longer if we keep supplying them with arms and ammunition. We cut off our assistance to South Vietnam just as it faced its greatest peril.
But that is not the reason we lost in Vietnam. The question remains: Why did we lose the two wars generations apart?
Three reasons come to mind. Militarily, we made our clients too dependent on machinery — air power, helicopters, artillery — while the enemy kept to guerrilla tactics in which they excelled.
In addition, corruption sapped the strength we were trying to build in our clients, and drained the faith of both South Vietnamese and Afghans in each government and its institutions.
Lastly and most important, our clients could never shake the impression that they were puppets fighting for foreigners, while the Viet Cong and the Taliban were able to present themselves as the true patriots fighting to rid their country of colonialism. In Afghanistan, the call to jihad to rid the country of foreigners has been a powerful motivator ever since the disastrous British retreat from Kabul in 1842, through the Russian withdrawal across the Oxus in 1989, and will remain so until Sept. 11, 2021 when we Americans finally close our tents and depart."
" Twenty years ago, when the twin towers and the Pentagon were still smoldering, there was a sense among America’s warrior and diplomatic class that history was starting anew for the people of Afghanistan and much of the Muslim world.
“Every nation has a choice to make,” President George W. Bush said on the day that bombs began falling on Oct. 7, 2001. In private, senior U.S. diplomats were even more explicit. “For you and us, history starts today,” then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage told his Pakistani counterparts.
“We assumed the rest of the world saw us as we saw ourselves,” he said. “And we believed that we could shape the world in our image using our guns and our money.” Both assumptions ignored Afghan culture, politics and history. Both, he said, were tragically wrong.
The near-collapse of the Afghan army in the space of just a few stunning weeks is prompting the military and Washington’s policymakers to reflect on their failures over the course of nearly two decades. To many, the roots of the disaster go back to the war’s earliest days, when the Taliban was first driven from power and the United States, still reeling from the shock of the 9/11 attacks, set about building a government in Kabul.
“You look at the Afghan constitution that was created in Bonn and it was trying to create a Western democracy,” said Michèle Flournoy, one of the architects of President Barack Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan in 2010. “In retrospect, the United States and its allies got it really wrong from the very beginning. The bar was set based on our democratic ideals, not on what was sustainable or workable in an Afghan context.”
Flournoy acknowledged in hindsight that the mistake was compounded across Republican and Democratic administrations, which continued with almost equal fervor to pursue goals that ran counter to decades — if not centuries — of the Afghan experience.
By 2009, when Obama took office, it was clear to just about everyone that the United States was losing the war.
To reverse Taliban momentum and give U.S. officials a chance to build up the Afghan government and security forces, Obama signed off on a surge of troops that more than doubled the size of the American force in Afghanistan.
Flournoy said she was initially hopeful that the plan could work. On trips to Afghanistan, she met frequently with young Afghans, including women’s groups, who shared America’s vision for the country. They wanted to send their daughters to school, serve in government, start businesses and nonprofits. They wanted women to be full participants in society and craved a predictable political and legal system. “We found all kinds of allies,” she said.
But those individuals were no match for the rot that had permeated the Afghan government. She and other U.S. officials understood that with all the U.S. money floating around in Afghanistan, there would be “petty corruption,” she said. What U.S. officials discovered in 2010, after the surge was already underway, [nearly a decade after we went to war!] was a corruption that ran far deeper than they had previously understood and that jeopardized their strategy, which depended on building the legitimacy of the Afghan government.
Now, as Taliban fighters race toward Kabul and the Afghan military crumbles, Flournoy said her thoughts often turn to the Americans who sacrificed for the mission and to those “wonderful allies” who shared the U.S. hopes for a democratic Afghanistan. “That’s what makes me so sick to my stomach,” she said. “We invested in this whole generation that is about to suffer through this very horrible chapter.”
As Taliban widens its grip, Afghans reckon with life under militant rule
Meanwhile, current and former U.S. officials are trying to make sense of why a government and security forces built over two decades at a cost of more than $100 billion dollars are collapsing so quickly.
Carter Malkasian, a longtime adviser to U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, has pegged the weakness of the Afghan forces on their lack of a unifying cause that resonates with Afghans, as well as their heavy dependence on the United States. By contrast, Taliban members were fighting for their culture and Islam. They “exemplified something that inspired, something that made them powerful in battle, something closely tied to what it meant to be an Afghan,” Malkasian writes in his new book, “The American War in Afghanistan.”
It’s an observation that speaks to the limits of American power and raises the broader question of how the catastrophic and embarrassing failure in Afghanistan might constrain U.S. foreign policy moving forward.
“We know what happens when we fall to imperial hubris. What does one do with imperial heartbreak?” asked John Gans, who served as a civilian in the Pentagon during the Obama administration.
Their numbers include lawmakers such as Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who joined the CIA, and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who signed up for the infantry, as well as top Biden foreign policy officials, such as Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.
It seems certain that in coming years the use of military force will be informed by this searing experience. U.S. foreign policy will be guided by more modest ambitions, especially when weighing the use of military power. Flournoy imagines a future in which military force is limited to more sharply defined objectives and informed by far greater humility when it comes to spreading democracy or changing societies.
In many cases, it’s a vision in which force is used to manage chronic problems, rather than solve them.
Another possibility is a U.S. foreign policy that is increasingly focused more on issues such as pandemics or climate change, which require U.S. leadership and a global response. Gans noted that more than 600,000 Americans have died of covid-19, far more than the number of U.S. lives lost to terrorism and war over the past 20 years.
For now, though, it seems unlikely that these threats will take center stage in U.S. foreign policy. The Pentagon, with its $740 billion budget, still sucks up a larger share of discretionary spending than any other government agency. Meanwhile, the foreign policy establishment has shifted its focus increasingly to the competition with the likes of Russia and China.
“After 9/11, everyone raced to become a Middle East or counterterrorism expert,” said Gans. “After covid, you don’t see many foreign policy people racing to become global health experts.”
In theory, the Taliban and the American-backed government are negotiating a peace accord, whereby the insurgents lay down their arms and participate instead in a redesigned political system. In the best-case scenario, strong American support for the government, both financial and military (in the form of continuing air strikes on the Taliban), coupled with immense pressure on the insurgents’ friends, such as Pakistan, might succeed in producing some form of power-sharing agreement. But even if that were to happen—and the chances are low—it would be a depressing spectacle. The Taliban would insist on moving backwards in the direction of the brutal theocracy they imposed during their previous stint in power, when they confined women to their homes, stopped girls from going to school and meted out harsh punishments for sins such as wearing the wrong clothes or listening to the wrong music.
That does not make Afghanistan a second Vietnam. For one thing, the Afghan war was never really the Pentagon’s or the nation’s focus. American troops were on the ground far longer in Afghanistan than they were in Vietnam, but far fewer of them died. Other events, from the war in Iraq to the global financial crisis, always seemed more important than what was happening in Kandahar. And American politicians and pundits have agonised over whether to stay or go for so long that, now the withdrawal has finally arrived, it has lost its power to shock. To the extent that outsiders see it as a sign of American weakness, that weakness has been evident for a long time.
Unhappy thingsShocking or not, though, the withdrawal is nonetheless a calamity for the people of Afghanistan. In 2001 many hoped that America might end their 20-year-old civil war and free them from a stifling, doctrinaire theocracy. For a time, it looked as though that might happen. But today the lives of ordinary Afghans are more insecure than ever: civilian casualties were almost 30% higher last year than in 2001, when the American deployment began, according to estimates from the un and academics. The economy is no bigger than it was a decade ago. And the mullahs are not only at the gates of Kabul; their assassins are inside, targeting Shias, secularists, women with important jobs—anyone who offends their blinkered worldview. America was never going to solve all Afghanistan’s problems, but to leave the country back at square one is a sobering failure." ■
Dig deeper
America’s trillion-dollar Afghan fiasco typifies its foreign policy
NBC Nightly News, hosted by Lester Holt, struck a similar tone in its July 2 broadcast, with correspondent Richard Engel saying that Biden “did not want to draw attention” to Afghanistan when pressed about the “impact of the withdrawal.” Engel continued, “but not talking about it won’t stop this. As U.S. troops leave, some Afghan security groups are collapsing…Most Afghans do not want the Taliban to return.”
There are manifold other ways that U.S. media outlets could frame American withdrawal. They could examine the rampant corruption and war crimes of the U.S.-backed Afghan military, air the voices of people who want the United States to leave, or ask hard questions about what a complete American exit — and U.S. reparations to the Afghan people — could look like. But after two decades of occupation, bombings, home raids and drone strikes, we’re still a long way from a free press that asks difficult questions when it comes to war and militarism. Instead, it’s relying on rote, self-serving cliches about a supposed humanitarian mission that simply never existed."
"To many watching now, the collapse seems so sudden. In the space of a few blistering summer months, Taliban forces have swept across much of Afghanistan. One after the other, provincial centers across the country’s north and west are being captured by the insurgents as government resistance melts away. When the militants on Thursday seized the city of Ghazni, it was the 10th provincial capital to fall in a week. Then, in what would be a stunning blow to the beleaguered government of President Ashraf Ghani, the Associated Press reported that Taliban forces also took over the major cities of Herat and Kandahar. A U.S. official told my colleagues that was not yet clear, though it was possible the cities could fall soon.
Now, with Kabul in its crosshairs, the Taliban finds itself in arguably its most powerful position since 2001, before it was ousted from power by the U.S.-led invasion. Reports are already coming in from areas under Taliban control of militants carrying out attacks on civilians and forcing young women into marriages. Meanwhile, the Afghan military — built through years of U.S. training and significant financial support — is reeling and demoralized. In city after city, soldiers surrendered or deserted their posts. In some instances, the Taliban drove off with U.S. military equipment, including weapons and vehicles.
U.S. officials reportedly contemplated relocating their embassy closer to the airport and urged American citizens in the country to leave immediately. Thousands of additional U.S. troops will be temporarily dispatched to secure staff for a potential evacuation. The Biden administration is desperately trying to rally disparate regional actors, from Afghanistan’s neighbors to the European Union to Russia and China, to present a united diplomatic front amid talks with Taliban envoys in Qatar. But the militants’ leverage is only growing as the echoes of Saigon 1975 ring all the louder in Kabul 2021.
According to U.S. intelligence assessments, the rapid disintegration of the Afghan security forces means a possible Taliban capture of Kabul itself could be a matter of months, perhaps even weeks [even three days from now]. The success of the Taliban offensive has coincided with the withdrawal of the last remaining detachments of U.S. and NATO troops in the country, announced by President Biden this year. The White House had initially timed the pullout to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, which were plotted by al-Qaeda militants given sanctuary by Afghanistan’s then-Taliban government.
“Look, we spent over a trillion dollars over 20 years,” Biden told reporters recently at the White House, “We trained and equipped, with modern equipment, over 300,000 Afghan forces. And Afghan leaders have to come together.”
It’s possible that the relatively small numbers of foreign forces left in the country could have done little to thwart the Taliban’s current advance, regardless of the declared withdrawal. For Biden, the country’s predicament was the source of mounting impatience. But for countless Afghans, including a burgeoning population of internally displaced people, the situation has become all the more hopeless.
But the writing has been on the wall for a long time. As my colleague Craig Whitlock has revealed with his award-winning reporting on a cache of internal U.S. government documents scrutinizing the failures of the American war-making and nation-building efforts in Afghanistan, successive U.S. administrations recognized that the Taliban were not going to be easily vanquished, that the Afghan state was weak and riddled with corruption, and that muddling through without a coherent strategy was still preferable to admitting defeat.
“The interviews and documents, many of them previously unpublished, show how the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump hid the truth for two decades,” Whitlock explained. “They were slowly losing a war that Americans once overwhelmingly supported. Instead, political and military leaders chose to bury their mistakes and let the war drift.”
Less than half a decade after the invasion, Bush administration officials were invoking analogies to the Vietnam War, as it became clear that the Taliban still posed a threat. “The turning point came at the end of 2005, beginning of 2006 when we finally woke up to the fact that there was an insurgency that could actually make us fail,” one administration official later told government interviewers. “Everything was turning the wrong way at the end of 2005.”
Yet, wrote Whitlock, “the Bush administration suppressed the internal warnings and put a shine on the war.”
Almost a decade later, at the end of 2014, Obama attempted to hail the end of the American military mission in the country after years of counterinsurgency, declaring in a statement that “the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion.” But U.S. officials knew that there was little end in sight and the Obama administration, Whitlock reported, “conjured up an illusion.” It communicated to Americans that U.S. forces were only remaining in “noncombat” roles. “But the Pentagon carved out numerous exceptions that, in practice, made the distinctions almost meaningless,”
Then came Trump, who loudly called for an end to costly U.S. military entanglements abroad. But he authorized an intensification of aerial bombing campaigns against Islamist militant targets that, according to one study, saw Afghan civilian casualties increase by about 330 percent.
Biden, a veteran of the Obama years, now owns his own moment in Afghanistan’s tumultuous history, a tragedy many years in the making."
