Why The Afghanistan Withdrawal Was Not Joe Biden’s Fault
The last-minute airport attack in Kabul was simply the last achievement of the Afghan government in failing its own people.
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 Kabul would still likely surrender in 8 days in 2031.
There was virtually no fighting for Kabul. Afghanistan on paper has roughly 300,000 soldiers who largely ghosted their service and opportunistically sold the war stuff we gave them 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 green new deal money amounting to more cash than America spent on the Marshall Plan, adjusted for inflation.
Contrast this to the epic, nationalist self-defense effort in Ukraine. The Ukrainian people, committed to their freedom and independence, rose up against the second strongest global power and dedicated themselves to protecting their democracy from the Russian occupiers.
That type of nationalism and patriotism just does not exist in Afghanistan, and twenty years of American assistance and guidance was not enough to keep the Afghan republic from being hopelessly corrupt. Many Afghans’ lives were 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.
The Afghan military for years cited and caused perennial maintenance problems of its equipment in order to delay war participation, and continue fleecing the US, 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, though now it does.
The Afghan people should reserve all blame for their awful, corrupt government which has so spectacularly failed them because 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 even the individual army soldier selling his bullets, Afghanistan is a failed national project—for many different countries. (America’s absence has one benefit in that China is now developing a foreign political interest in meddling in Afghan affairs. The US should encourage China taking a chance at touching the hot stove that is Afghanistan, and watch as dictator Xi bogs down an increasingly significant percentage of the Chinese military for a sisyphean decade or more holding the world’s hot potato nation. Welcome to the great power club, China!)
So don’t listen to the journalists, columnists, and TV opinionators across the political spectrum who will spend the next year attacking Biden for the messy and chaotic Afghan withdrawal. The media’s collective hive mind Biden-blaming for clickbait and “tough-on-both-sides” whataboutism is the same hive mind sensationalism 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.”
Of course, the absolute worst takes have come from conservative media, with the critically unexamined rhetoric we’ve come to expect. After four years of celebrating Trump’s self-congratulating about winding down the troop presence around the globe, and his decision to withdraw completely by May 1st (into the Biden presidency, not his own), these conservative pundits savaged Biden when that exit deadline came and passed for prolonging the withdrawal for two months to more responsibly exit. Fox News commentators sarcastically opined that Biden would keep the Afghan forever war going at least another four years.
But these same critics drooled all over themselves with round-the-clock accusations of Saigon 2.0, conspicuously quiet about the fact that Republicans were the architects, builders, and cheerleaders of this 20-year expeditionary, nation-building odyssey throughout the Middle East, as well as its close. The Trump Administration negotiated the withdrawal date and details, and gave the Taliban a sweetheart deal because Trump, as always, only cared about the photo-op of signing a deal, the details be damned.
Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo legitimized the Taliban, freed 5,000 Taliban prisoners to rejoin the fight, and earned much deserved criticism for not including the Afghan government in their Taliban negotiations. 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 terrible, awful, preposterously bad dealmaker.
Adding insult to international injury, Trump 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 a long, long time ago. 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 professional media gotcha cops can understand the presidential buck obviously implied the Afghan army wouldn’t outright refuse to fight, and that top Afghan officials wouldn’t flee the country immediately. Should Biden have grabbed a rifle and gone to fight the Taliban himself? Should he have re-invaded Afghanistan with another surge? Of course, there is nothing anyone in America’s government or military could do. 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 Taliban won. They outlasted us. Ultimately, it’s not a surprising thing to happen. It’s their country, and endless war and tribal competition has been their normal, every day life for decades and centuries. We even directly subsidized this endless warring 40 years ago when the Soviets were trying to stabilize Afghanistan. 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. Which is the one good faith criticism of the Biden Administration available, though only if you remember that Trump had no plan for refugees whatsoever, and that Stephen Miller helped him tear up all the visa and immigration policies that would have expedited the current Afghan refugee processes. 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 heroically gave the Afghan government 20 years of economic growth, a massive military jobs program, modern infrastructure installations, urban security and relative freedom, but the Afghan government squandered the gift and made the crisis the world is 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 unusual presidential 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.”
Thanks for your eyeballs!
—Dash MacIntyre
Follow me on Twitter at @HalfwayPost and Threads to interrupt your daily doomscrolling with Dada news, and follow me on Medium to keep up with my daily writing studio. My new poetry book, Cabaret No Stare, is available now.
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