Chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal calls for 9/11-style commission
The lesson of presidential power is not learned from how it is exercised in the best of times but how it manifests in crisis. In crisis come mistakes and from mistakes hopefully come knowledge to improve future decisions.
A long list of presidential miscalculations in foreign policy have defined governing legacies, reshaping leadership for a sitting president and sometimes future occupants of the Oval Office.
President Joe Biden has already said he will not demand resignations for the death of 13 service members and countless Afghans at the hand of a suicide bomber during the final days of the airlift. Biden described the evacuation as an “extraordinary success” although Americans and Afghans who wanted to leave remained as the last plane departed without them.
Questions must be answered, both internally and externally, about the decisions and tactics leading up to and through the United States’ final moment in Afghanistan.
Historians and pundits will debate whether the die of inevitability was cast years ago, but there can be no denial of the departure from Kabul, while historic and massive, heroic and tragic, also represented a failure of imagination.
The nation must traverse the avenue of tough questions in regard to Afghanistan. The after-action review of the 9/11 Commission, an independent, bipartisan panel, identified missed signs, unresolved contradictory intelligence and information silos that collected crucial information but were unable or unwilling to connect to threat indications in other parts of government.
The commission’s overall conclusion was that coordination and information sharing could have presented a clearer and perhaps actionable warning of the pending terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
Into this moment, we urge Congress to authorize an independent, bipartisan commission to review the final stages of the end of American presence in Afghanistan — from the Trump administration’s ill-advised unilateral peace agreement with the Taliban through the Biden administration’s chaotic evacuation.
This commission must have credible leadership along the lines of what Republican Tom Kean, a former governor, and Democrat Lee Hamilton, a former U.S. congressman, provided the nation after the 9/11 attacks.
Created by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush, the commission had the authority to subpoena witnesses and the credibility to maneuver the minefields of executive privilege and separation of power concerns.
But most of all it wasn’t an effort to assign blame, but an effort to identify why signs that appeared so obvious in retrospect eluded the analysis that might have averted the deadly attacks on U.S. soil.
There are many lessons to learn from 20 years of war in Afghanistan, including missed opportunities, a shifting mission, the lack of a stable central government and the meddling of regional neighbors such as Pakistan. But the last two years, including the first eight months of the Biden administration when the withdrawal became a reality, deserve additional scrutiny and insight that only a commission of significant heft and a fair-minded approach can offer.