The Legacy Of Joe Biden On The Afghan War

The last-minute airport attack in Kabul was simply the last achievement of the Afghan government in failing its own people.

Photo by Andre Klimke on Unsplash

With the 2024 election about to ramp up, here’s a well-needed reminder that it was not President Biden’s fault that Afghanistan refused to stand up for itself. We could have prolonged this inevitability for 10 more years, and I believe, in 2031, the Kabul government would still surrender in 8 days.

There was virtually no fighting for Kabul. Afghanistan on paper has roughly 300,000 soldiers, a number inflated full of soldiers ghosting their service and selling their war supplies on the black market. The Afghan army allegedly outnumbered the Taliban almost 3–1, and they had American-made, technologically sophisticated gear and humvees paid for with lots of America’s past two decades’ worth of available infrastructure, healthcare, and social spending, amounting to more cash than America spent on the Marshall Plan across all of Europe, adjusted for inflation.

Contrast Afghanistan’s collapse to the nationalistic self-defense effort in Ukraine. The Ukrainian people rose up against the second strongest global power, and dedicated themselves with astounding civic cohesion to protecting their democracy from the Russian occupiers, contrary to Russian claims that Russians and Ukrainians are the same people.

That type of nationalism, patriotism, and social homogeneity just does not exist in Afghanistan, and twenty years of American gentle-parenting was not enough to keep the Afghan republic from being hopelessly corrupt and tribally opportunistic. It’s true that many Afghans’ lives are ruined with our withdrawal, which is of course awful, but we spent 20 years going into debt to buy them a federal democratic republic, a military employing more personnel than most of our NATO allies, and, most importantly, more than enough time to build a free society worth fighting for. There was no fight.

The Afghan military fleeced the military for years citing and intentionally sabotaging maintenance problems of its equipment to delay battling while Afghan kleptocrats laundered much of our aid money. The Afghans also had an air force with roughly 183 aircraft. It’s important to note here that the Taliban had no air force, but now it does!

The Afghan people should reserve blame for their awful government, which has so spectacularly failed them. It is not fair for America to continue to sacrifice for a country that won’t sacrifice for itself. From the very top, down to the lowest local bureaucrat and individual army soldier selling his bullets, Afghanistan is a failed national project.

Journalists, columnists, and TV opinionators across the political spectrum will spend the next year or even Biden’s whole term attacking him for the messy and chaotic Afghan withdrawal. The media has fell into a collective hive mind doom loop of clickbait Biden-blaming for a “tough-on-both-sides” opportunity. It is sensationalism, the kind that turned Afghanistan into a forever war, swept us into Iraq, and passively parroted for years the military and political talking points and spin about how we’re “making progress,” and “the Afghans are standing up,” and “two more years will give us the leverage we need to bring the Taliban to the table,” and “one more surge will win the war.”

The worst takes come from right, with the kind of unexamined rhetoric we’ve come to expect from our conservative party’s two-decade brain melt. After four years of celebrating Trump’s self-congratulating about winding down the troop presence and his signature deal to withdraw completely by May 1st, 2021 (in the Biden presidency, mind you, not Trump’s presidency), these conservative pundits savaged Biden when that deadline came and passed, accusing him of prolonging the withdrawal. Fox News commentators sarcastically opined that Biden would keep the Afghan forever war going at least another four years. So Biden took extra time to be better prepared, because Trump had not prepared anything.

But these same conservative critics are drooling over these round-the-clock accusations of Saigon 2.0, conspicuously uninterested in how, all along, all these twenty years, Republicans were the architects, builders, and cheerleaders of this 20-year expeditionary, nation-building odyssey throughout the Middle East. And Donald Trump signed his name to the final ending treaty. His administration negotiated the withdrawal date and details, and managed also to give the Taliban a sweetheart deal because Trump, as always, cared most about the photo-op of signing a deal, the details be damned.

The details Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo hammered out legitimized the Taliban as the government, freed 5,000 Taliban prisoners to rejoin the civil war. Meanwhile, on the actual Afghan republic side of things, Trump boxed them out of the negotiations, and essentially handed the keys of Afghanistan to fundamentalists who don’t want women to be educated, or seen in public, or even heard. Trump characteristically applauded himself for these Taliban deals, though the Republican National Committee quickly scrubbed its website of such praise after the Kabul airport bombing, and it’s one more example that Donald Trump is, always has been, and always will be a bad, terrible, awful dealmaker.

Adding insult to international injury, Trump specifically bragged to his political rally crowds about how he designed the withdrawal deal so that Biden would be powerless to stop it, and said repeatedly that getting out of Afghanistan was a “wonderful and positive thing to do” we should have done much sooner. Biden’s hands were tied by Mr. “I take no responsibility.”

The media can pedantically point out in bad faith that Biden admitted the buck stopped with him, but gotcha cops can understand the presidential buck obviously implies the Afghan army wouldn’t immediately give up, and top Afghan officials wouldn’t immediately flee the country. Should Biden have grabbed a gun and flown to Afghanistan? Should Biden have the US re-invade Afghanistan again with one more surge? There is nothing America’s government or military can do anymore. The Afghan republic gave up, failed its long-suffering citizens, and, above all, failed its 66,000+ security forces who died trying to make something of Afghanistan.

The result of the Afghanistan War is that the Taliban won. They, like other countries before it, outlasted the United States of America. It’s not a surprising result. It’s their country, and endless war and tribal competition has been their normal, everyday life for decades. We subsidized this endless warring 40 years ago when the Soviets got involved. From the invasion onward, the Taliban knew all they had to do was wait. And they waited, and we left, and unfortunately we have little say anymore on the matter of what happens to the Afghan people beyond taking as many refugees as we can as fast as possible. The scenes and images of crowds at the airport, women back in burqas, and renewed Taliban oppression are heartrending, but that’s what losing a war looks like.

This chaos is not thanks to Biden. Afghan leaders asked America to stay a little longer to prevent a complete collapse of confidence in their government, and the Biden Administration acquiesced. Unfortunately, Afghan officials really only wanted to guarantee that they themselves could be the first out the door. Ex-President Ghani, who had been promising Biden that the Afghan army would fight, was among the first to flee.

Contrast again with Ukraine. President Zelensky did not flee. The humanitarian disaster we saw at the Kabul airport is simply the last, buzzer-beating achievement of the Afghan government in fucking over its own people.

America gave the Afghan government 20 years of economic growth, a massive military jobs program, modern infrastructure installations, modern urban security, and relative freedom. The Afghan government has squandered this gift and made the crisis the world is currently watching inevitable.

And, even worse for America, the US soiled many of our values and ideals along the way. We let the hopeful ends of a democratic and stable Afghanistan justify the means of shrugging off the kleptocracy of Hamid Karzai’s enduring crony capitalism, the massive opium drug trade, and the Afghan military’s rampant use of little boys as sex slaves.

So now, finally, the Afghan War is over. No one can say we didn’t try, but we did fail to make a majority of Afghan society care about being a nation-state, having democracy, serving and protecting its citizens, or even sustaining its governmental republic existence.

The Afghan War will forever be a historical scar on American history, a cornucopia of bipartisan mistakes, and a textbook example of nation-building hubris, but, truly of all the bad decisions available, the least bad decision for Biden to make was to follow through on leaving. Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden all campaigned on ending the war, and finally American voters’ will was honored.

At the very least, America can take comfort and solace in finally having a president in Biden who is not lying to us or faking optimism. “The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated,” Biden said with refreshing honesty, adding later “I know my decision will be criticized, but I would rather take all that criticism than pass this decision on to another president of the United States.”

So rest in peace America’s War in Afghanistan (2001–2021). And let’s carve on the war’s tombstone Biden’s history-making words: “It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not.” 🥃

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