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“The Taliban swept into Afghanistan’s capital Sunday after the government collapsed… As the insurgents closed in, President Ashraf Ghani flew out of the country… Helicopters raced overhead throughout the day to evacuate personnel from the U.S. Embassy. Smoke rose near the compound as staff destroyed important documents, and the American flag was lowered. Several other Western missions also prepared to pull their people out.” AP News
Both sides are critical of the withdrawal process and lament the consequences for Afghan civilians:
“Why did we withdraw all troops weeks ago, knowing the risk that would create of a lightning Taliban advance, only to have to reinsert 5,000 this weekend to get American diplomats out safely before they were massacred by advancing jihadis? And just as importantly, why didn’t we start evacuating Afghans who had aided U.S. forces months ago? Biden should have made up his mind on Afghanistan by the time he took office on January 20. If he was committed to withdrawal, the order could have been given that day to begin evacuating Afghan interpreters and other allied agents…
“‘The puzzle for me is the absence of contingency planning: If everyone knew we were headed for the exits, why did we not have a plan over the past two years for making this work?’ said retired general Douglas Lute to the NYT… Americans can tolerate withdrawal from Afghanistan happily. They can even tolerate seeing the Taliban back in power. But they won’t tolerate the needless humiliation of having our diplomats chased out in a panic or the needless horror of seeing Afghans who trusted us to guarantee their safety betrayed.”
Allahpundit, Hot Air
“Perhaps the effort to rebuild the country was doomed from the start. But our abandonment of the Afghans who helped us, counted on us, staked their lives on us, is a final, gratuitous shame that we could have avoided. The Biden administration failed to heed the warnings on Afghanistan, failed to act with urgency—and its failure has left tens of thousands of Afghans to a terrible fate. This betrayal will live in infamy.”
George Packer, The Atlantic
“Numberless Afghans who had worked for years alongside American troops, civil society groups, aid organizations and journalists, including the many who had worked with The New York Times, abruptly found themselves in mortal danger on Sunday… This calamity cannot be laid alone at President Biden’s feet, but it is incumbent on the current administration to make right what has gone wrong with the withdrawal plans. The U.S. military is, if nothing else, a logistical superpower, and it should move heaven and earth and anything in between to rescue those people who have risked everything for a better future. Red tape shouldn’t stand between allies and salvation.”
Editorial Board, New York Times
“Mr. Trump’s withdrawal deadline was a mistake, but Mr. Biden could have maneuvered around it. He knows this because his Administration conducted an internal policy review that provided him with options. The Taliban had already violated its pledges under the deal. Mr. Biden could have maintained the modest presence his military and foreign-policy advisers suggested. He could have decided to withdraw but done so based on conditions on the ground while preparing the Afghans with a plan for transition and air support. Instead he ordered a rapid and total withdrawal at the onset of the annual fighting season in time for the symbolic target date of 9/11.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
Other opinions below.
“In Washington, U.S. forces supposedly had to leave to end a costly ‘forever war.’ But when Mr. Biden made the decision to withdraw, no more than 3,500 U.S. troops were left in Afghanistan. They were supporting Afghans who were taking the brunt of the fight, and not a single American soldier had been killed in combat in a year and a half…
“In Washington, the envisioned withdrawal would be safe, inconsequential, and irreversible. But, as in Iraq in 2011, the enemy has a say. American troops are already redeploying to Afghanistan, just as troops returned to Iraq in 2014 after al Qaeda returned under the name of ISIS. In Washington, leaders described the jihadist threat as having moved from Afghanistan…
“But the Afghanistan-Pakistan region remains an epicenter for terrorism. More than 20 U.S.-designated terrorist organizations call the region home, and many remain determined to murder Americans and our allies.”
H.R. McMaster and Bradley Bowman, Wall Street Journal
“We left behind military technology and hardware. We left behind allies to be slaughtered. We spent $700 million to build an embassy only to beg the Taliban not to level it. Both Barack Obama and Donald Trump wanted to leave Afghanistan, but neither man did what Joe Biden just did. An entire country is now back in the hands of a rogue regime that still wants to kill us… Our intelligence and military elite assumed the Afghans would hang on at least 90 days. The Afghans fell in less than 7 days… So were they lying or fools or both?”
Erick-Woods Erickson, Substack
Others argue, “The U.S. can keep killing Taliban fighters in perpetuity, but if Washington doesn’t have an Afghan partner on the ground that is capable, somewhat self-sufficient and frankly honest about its failures, then no amount of U.S. firepower will prove useful over the long-haul. Since 2002, the U.S. has spent over $88 billion building, arming, and enabling the Afghan security forces in the hope that Kabul will eventually be capable of fielding a modern army without leaning on the U.S. for constant assistance. The strategy hasn’t worked…
“Afghanistan was in a civil war long before the U.S. military deployed to the country in what was supposed to be a relatively constrained counterterrorism operation in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks. Despite the valiant efforts of U.S. troops, there is only so much Washington can do if the host nation’s political elite proves to be perpetually fragmented, unwilling to reform itself, and more interested in internal squabbles than meeting the needs of its own citizenry. This is exactly the situation the U.S. faces in Afghanistan – and after two decades, U.S. officials rightly made the decision to stop pretending otherwise.”
Daniel DePetris, USA Today
“In fairness to the Biden Administration, it inherited from the Trump Administration a terrible situation, because of the concessions the Trump Administration had made to the Taliban about the timing of a U.S. withdrawal. I said earlier that the U.S. deployment that Biden pulled was small, and the violence faced by them was de minimis, but that was true largely because of the terms of the flawed deal that the Trump Administration had negotiated with the Taliban, in which one of the commitments by the Taliban was not to attack U.S. troops in exchange for a hard deadline of May of this year for the last troops to leave…
“So, when the Biden Administration, in the pressure-filled first weeks of its term, reviewed the situation, it understandably feared that, if it tried to repudiate or rewrite the agreement that the Trump Administration had reached, it might transform a relatively quiet and stable experience for the U.S. military into another bloody round of combat that would undermine the Administration’s plans and foreign-policy priorities. So it pulled the plug and got exactly that result, which is now all that anyone is talking about.”
Steve Coll, New Yorker
“Trump would not have made any greater effort than Biden to protect the Afghan people as he withdrew U.S. forces — if anything, his track record and character suggest he would have been even more indifferent. His withdrawal would not have been ‘conditions-based,’ as Trump claims, because the imagined conditions for an orderly U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan have never existed and will never exist. Three successive U.S. presidents attempted to produce those conditions, and they all kept getting sucked back in…
“The sad fact is that America’s departure from Afghanistan was always going to be a bloody, chaotic, heartbreaking mess. Biden has chosen to oversee that inevitable tragedy rather than extend the entanglement to yet another president. Americans might debate the wisdom of that decision and how it has been carried out, but after 20 years of war, it was a decision that had to be made.”
Jonah Shepp, New York Magazine
“It’s not just an epic defeat for the United States. The fall of Kabul may serve as a bookend for the era of U.S. global power. In the nineteen-forties, the United States launched the Great Rescue to help liberate Western Europe from the powerful Nazi war machine. It then used its vast land, sea, and air power to defeat the formidable Japanese empire in East Asia. Eighty years later, the U.S. is engaged in what historians may someday call a Great Retreat from a ragtag militia that has no air power or significant armor and artillery, in one of the poorest countries in the world… It’s hard to see how the United States salvages its reputation or position anytime soon.”
Robin Wright, New Yorker
A libertarian's take
“Reputations for resolve are not quite as portable as the commentariat believes. The U.S. desire to withdraw from Afghanistan does not translate into a similar preference about Europe, Latin America or the Pacific Rim, all of which contain more vital U.S. interests. Indeed, Chatham House Director Robin Niblett is correct when he tweets that ‘withdrawal from Afghanistan does not equate to a pullback from core US alliance commitments in Europe & Asia. It’s a brutal re-focus in their favour.’…
“What the events of the past week do [though] is shred America’s reputation for policy competence… Policy competence, an essential component of soft power, is a force multiplier. It means that other actors on the global stage believe in your ability to do what you say you can do. Policy incompetence has the opposite effect… Long-standing allies are not going to fret about U.S. resolve in the face of Afghanistan. They are going to worry about whether the Biden administration will mess up other policy initiatives as badly as it messed up in Kabul.”
Daniel W. Drezner, Washington Post
