“There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy … of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”
That was how President Joe Biden responded on July 8 to a question regarding possible parallels between the withdrawal from South Vietnam in 1975 and the then-pending withdrawal from Afghanistan.
It is now clear that the administration’s assessment of the likely consequences was wrong. Three things are worth considering:
- U.S. policy in Afghanistan has been based on self-delusion and outright lying to the American people and to Congress;
- Few analysts were surprised by the Taliban’s strength; most were surprised by the government’s feather-in-the-wind dissolution, which is its own commentary after 20 years, $1 trillion, thousands of U.S. service members killed, and a generation of war; and
- The important remaining U.S. interests are counterterrorism and attempting to rescue those who helped the U.S. war effort there.
U.S. policy in Afghanistan, and the government’s message to the American people about it, have been built on lies and delusions for almost the entire course of the war. The American people, having swallowed those lies, are now aghast.
Craig Whitlock at the Post has been covering the issue for years. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has been on the record for years. And nobody cared until it was too late.
To recap What We Knew and When We Knew It:
Jamie Ross, “Secret Documents Show We Were ‘Constantly Lied to’ by U.S. Officials Over ‘Unwinnable’ Afghan War,” Daily Beast, December 9, 2019.
Craig Whitlock, “Afghan War Plagued by ‘Mendacity’ and Lies, Inspector General Tells Congress,” January 15, 2020.
Similarly, journalist Spencer Ackerman, whom Cato hosted on Friday, was running through some of his old clips over the weekend and found a few of note:
“Military’s Own Report Card Gives Afghan Surge an F,” Wired.com, September 27, 2012.
“‘Data-Entry Error’ Led Military to Falsely Claim Taliban Attacks Are Down,” Wired.com, February 26, 2013.
“Military Decides You Shouldn’t See Key Data on Afghan Insurgency,” Wired.com, March 6, 2013.
In fairness, American officials didn’t just lie to you: they lied to themselves, too. Michèle Flournoy, who helped implement President Obama’s Afghanistan surge at the Defense Department, recently explained that she had been hopeful because:
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.
It should have been obvious that the sorts of people meeting with American defense officials would support the American mission in Afghanistan. With due respect to their rights and prerogatives, those people were far less relevant to the success or failure of the mission than were the men with guns.
What the administration got wrong was not the Taliban’s strength, which most analysts knew perfectly well. What it mistook was the strength of the Afghan government. In province after province, leaders literally handed the keys over to the Taliban.
In Ghazni, the governor “simply handed over his office to a senior Taliban commander. ‘He gave a flower to the Taliban commander and congratulated him,’” said an employee of the governor. Ismail Khan, a warlord known as “the Lion of Herat” appeared in a video released by the Taliban after his surrender saying “I hope all brothers can create a peaceful environment, so the war ends and we can have peace and stabilization in Afghanistan.” Only three months ago, former president Ashraf Ghani was telling Der Spiegel that his government could resist the Taliban “forever. If I did anything, it was to prepare our forces for this situation.”
It is a morbid thought, but if a Taliban takeover was inevitable, as it certainly appears now, we might be grateful that the people of Afghanistan avoided a civil war on the road to that destination. The experience in Syria, in which a brutal civil war resulted in Assad staying in power, seems like the worst possible outcome.
But it is distressing that all the U.S. effort over 20 years produced a government that immediately collapsed. In 2009, I helped organize a letter to President Obama warning that “Engaging in competitive governance with the Taliban is a counterproductive strategy… If we cannot leave Afghanistan until we have created an effective central government, we are likely to be there for decades, with no guarantee of success.”
There are two important issues to monitor going forward: U.S. diplomacy with the Taliban and the fate of translators, fixers, and others who helped U.S. forces.
The United States still has counterterrorism interests in Afghanistan. Simply folding our arms and refusing to talk to the Taliban is not an option. Mike Pompeo, of all people, defended his own diplomacy with the Taliban yesterday, saying “we did good work to crush al Qaeda. When we left office, there were fewer than 200 al Qaeda left in Afghanistan.” That work on establishing American counterterrorism objectives needs to continue, even in light of the Taliban takeover of the country.
In addition, the Biden administration’s analytical failure in thinking about how soon a Taliban takeover could occur is probably to blame for its sluggishness in processing Special Immigrant Visas for those people. They must speed up and clarify their policy on that issue.
More generally, if the fate of Afghanistan truly bothers Americans, they should vow to scrutinize the optimistic claims of their political and military leaders—before, during, and after our wars.
