In a televised speech on Monday, Joe Biden defended his decision to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan and his handling of a crisis that has seen the Taliban capture the country in a lightning offensive. Blaming Afghan politicians and the country’s security forces for the calamitous collapse, he also sought to distance himself from previous administrations. But how much of it was fair or even accurate?
Biden: We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on September 11, 2001, and make sure al-Qaida could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again. We did that. We severely degraded al-Qaida in Afghanistan. We never gave up the hunt for Osama bin Laden and we got him.
Often forgotten 20 years on is the speed with which the US and its allies went to war in Afghanistan after 9/11. Operation Enduring Freedom, as it was called, began on 7 October 2001, less than a month after al-Qaida’s attacks.
The initial stated aims of the US-led response, as outlined by President George W Bush in his speech to the joint houses of Congress that declared the beginning of the “war on terror” on 20 September, were punitive, stating that the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan had to “turn over all the leaders of the al-Qaida terrorist group based in that country, close every terrorist training camp there, hand over all terrorists to appropriate authorities, and give the United States full access to terrorist training camps.”
However, after the rapid fall of the Taliban, and confronted with the reality of an impoverished Afghan society traumatised by many long conflicts, Bush – long dismissive of nation-building – on 17 April 2002 called for a Marshall plan for Afghanistan to cement the successes of the initial military operation.
In a speech to cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, Bush was explicit about what would become the hallmarks of western efforts over the following two decades, including building an Afghan military capacity, stable democratic institutions and equal access in education.
“We know that true peace will only be achieved when we give the Afghan people the means to achieve their own aspirations,” he said. “Peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan develop its own stable government. Peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan train and develop its own national army. And peace will be achieved through an education system for boys and girls which works.’’
The two major Bush speeches, seven months apart, set out the totality of the US vision for Afghanistan. Biden has cherrypicked the aims of the first speech only.
After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw US forces. That’s why we’re still there. We were clear-eyed about the risks. We planned for every contingency. But I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you … So I’m left again to ask of those who argue that we should stay: ‘How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghan troops will not?’
Afghan security forces have died in vastly larger numbers than western forces, so while there are genuine questions to be asked about training, military funding and morale, it is not fair to say Afghan troops have not been willing to fight. During the course of the past 20 years, upwards of 66,000 Afghan police and military have lost their lives, in comparison with about 3,500 coalition casualties.
There are also arguments to be had about how clear-eyed the US plans have been for “every contingency”. Despite acknowledging the broadly held assumption that the Taliban would probably be dominant on the battlefield within six months of the announced US withdrawal, it is clear from public statements that the US did not expect Kabul to fall so quickly, nor plan for it.
Indeed, as critics have pointed out, the fly-by-night abandonment of the military airbase at Bagram relinquished not only a secure facility that could easily have been used for evacuation, but also compromised the Afghan military’s supply and logistics chain at a crucial moment.
I’ve argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counter-terrorism, not counter-insurgency or nation-building. That’s why I opposed the surge when it was proposed in 2009 when I was vice-president. And that’s why as president I’m adamant we focus on the threats we face today, in 2021, not yesterday’s threats.
Biden is being somewhat disingenuous here. While he has been vocal in the last few years about “how he opposed the surge”, he has also argued for more troop numbers, including in a June 2006 foreign relations committee hearing, three years before the surge began.
Back then, Biden said: “Iraq’s drain on our military resources has been felt clearly in Afghanistan, where our inattention gave the Taliban a new lease on life. I remember the debate we had after at least my first trip to Afghanistan right after the Taliban was defeated, where I spent considerable time with Secretary of State [Colin] Powell arguing – and he agreed, I might add – that we should add resources … They were all saying – it was uniform – we needed more, more – not fewer, but more assets in order to finish the job.”
Despite that, his argument about the futility of counter-insurgency has been well made by a number of prominent figures, most recently the former US ambassador to Afghanistan Michael McKinley, who in an essay for Foreign Affairs has noted that the trajectory of the war after the surge has been one of an “eroding stalemate”, seeing slow Taliban gains.
McKinley quotes the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Mike Mullen, who opposed the US surge past 2011, arguing that “if we did not show significant progress over the course of 18 months or so then we had the wrong strategy”.
Here’s what I believe to my core: It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not. The political leaders of Afghanistan were unable to come together for the good of their people, unable to negotiate for the future of their country when the chips were down.
They would never have done so while US troops remained in Afghanistan bearing the brunt of the fighting for them. And our true strategic competitors, China and Russia, would love nothing more than the United States to continue to funnel billions of dollars in resources and attention into stabilizing Afghanistan indefinitely.
Biden’s point about unity is fair. As McKinley points out, Afghan leaders have never cohered around a strategy to defeat the Taliban. When leaders visited Biden in June, “unity was nonexistent except in name”, he says, with President Ashraf Ghani an isolated and polarising figure. However, it is hard to see what they were supposed to negotiate, given the terms of the deal struck by Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, with the Taliban in Doha the year before, in which the US agreed to withdraw all troops in return for a Taliban pledge to prevent al-Qaida from operating and to negotiate with the Afghan government.
The US messaging, both public and in its actions over the last two years, has been abundantly clear to many in Afghanistan and to foreign allies such as the UK: like it or not, the US was leaving soon. It was that, more than anything else, which undermined the morale of the Afghan government and its forces while encouraging the Taliban.