The truth about losing Afghanistan
To charge President Biden with “losing” Afghanistan makes no more sense than tagging President Gerald Ford with responsibility for “losing” Vietnam. The war in Vietnam was effectively lost well before Ford even took office. The same judgment applies to Biden and Afghanistan.
True, neither president distinguished himself in the way that he presided over the end game. Americans expect their commander-in-chief to exercise command. When crunch time came, both Ford and Biden found themselves as hardly more than passive witnesses.
That said, any serious inquiry into sources of America’s failure in Afghanistan will look well beyond the actions (or inaction) of the luckless individual who happened to occupy the Oval Office when the wheels finally came off.
The point is not to give Biden a pass. He should be held accountable. But Americans should recognize that there is plenty of blame to go around. Several administrations, members of both political parties, more than a few warmongering pundits, and a passel of generals own pieces of this catastrophe.
Some few in the media circus are beginning to recognize this. The headline of a piece by Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan makes the essential point: “The Afghan debacle lasted two decades. The media spent two hours deciding whom to blame.”
To understand the trajectory of events that brought us to where things are today, we need to return to the beginning. Just shy of two decades ago in December 2001, with the Taliban freshly routed from Kabul, the United States and its allies met in Bonn, Germany, to hammer out their vision for the future of liberated Afghanistan. The agreed-upon goals included “national reconciliation, lasting peace, [and] stability and respect for human rights” throughout the country. The Bonn conferees also vowed to guarantee “the right of the people of Afghanistan to freely determine their own political future in accordance with the principles of Islam, democracy, pluralism and social justice.”
The agreed-upon goals were nothing short of presumptuous. Today the United States itself could use a strong dose of “national reconciliation.” That a mere 20 years ago, senior U.S. officials claimed the prerogative of conferring reconciliation on a distant people of ancient provenance testifies to their astonishing hubris.
Nor, as a practical matter, did Washington have any intention of actually allowing
Afghans to “freely determine” their future. They were expected to do so in accordance with prevailing Western conceptions of “democracy, pluralism and social justice.” Mark me down as favoring each, although there, too, Americans presently fall well short of perfection.
Crucially, however, many Afghans — perhaps most — subscribe to a different understanding of what values should determine their way of life. They show little inclination of surrendering their traditional views, at least not without a fight. In short, resistance was baked into this cake before it was even put into the oven.
The point is that the United States committed itself to a set of immensely challenging goals — and then made no more than a half-hearted effort to achieve them. In March 2003, apparently assuming that success in Afghanistan was already in hand, the George W. Bush administration initiated a second and unrelated war. Expectations in Iraq mirrored those that had shaped U.S. policy in Afghanistan: A quick military victory would result in an easily achieved transformation of that country.
This proved to be a monumental miscalculation. When was the Afghanistan War lost? Probably about the time when a combination of civil war and insurgency enveloped Iraq, with U.S. officials in Washington and the U.S. military thereafter consigning Afghanistan to the status of an afterthought. For years thereafter, the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan languished, while Iraq absorbed the lion’s share of the Pentagon’s resources and attention.
Even the “surge” of an additional 30,000 U.S. troops ordered by President Barack Obama in December 2009, a move then-Vice President Biden opposed, amounted to little more than a gesture. After a mere 18 months, Obama announced, U.S. troops would begin to come home. All the Taliban needed to do was to sit tight. And if any doubts remained about America’s eagerness to call it quits, President Donald Trump removed them when he initiated “peace talks” with the enemy from which the government in Kabul were excluded.
As early as 2014, President Hamid Karzai, handpicked by Washington to lead Afghanistan, had signaled his wish for all U.S. forces to leave his country. The United States was no longer welcome. Karzai thought that Afghans should be allowed to work out their own destiny in their own way.
We refused to listen. We should have. Had we done so, we might have saved ourselves a load of grief, embarrassment and humiliation.
Bacevich is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new book is “After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed.”