• Local veteran expresses frustration over Kabul’s rapid fall to Taliban,
The rapid collapse of Afghanistan after the American pullout is no surprise to anyone who served there.
U.S.military members who served in Afghanistan said they saw many examples of individual Afghan bravery during the 20-year war there. But in interviews in May after President Joe Biden announced U.S. troops would be leaving the country, they said they also saw units collapse under pressure without Americans to bolster them.
One of them, Summer Rogowski, of Canonsburg, served in Army intelligence in Afghanistan, trying to recruit locals as sources to support the U.S. mission of helping the Afghans eventually help themselves. Later, she returned as a contractor with the job of tracking IED patterns in an attempt to prevent U.S. soldier deaths.
She said Monday she was not surprised that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled right away when the Taliban swept in, because “we watched Afghans flee in the field whether they had the advantage or not.”
But it’s not just the Afghan soldiers who are to blame.
She said politicians also failed. Mr. Biden was briefed earlier this year that if a peace deal was not in place, the Taliban would take over quickly. The intelligence community warned that Afghanistan could collapse within six months after a withdrawal without a powersharing plan in place, according to an assessment reported in the Wall Street Journal in June. As it turned out, it happened even faster than that.
“We spent so much money, time and more importantly lives there and now we are sending soldiers back in to fight when politicians failed to do the right thing, any attempt at all to come to the table before we left,” Ms. Rogowski said in an email.
Mr. Biden had previously said that the Afghan army had 300,000 well-equipped and trained members compared to the Taliban’s 75,000 and that a collapse was not inevitable. He also said that the Taliban is not “remotely comparable” to the North Vietnamese army, rejecting comparisons to the enemy during the American withdrawal from Vietnam.
“There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of [an] embassy ... from Afghanistan,” the president said.
But that’s exactly what Americans are seeing now.
“It is infuriating to hear
Biden say he disagreed with the analysts,” Ms. Rogowski said. “The intelligence was there; he ignored it. It’s not the first time a politician did what they wanted and ignored intelligence. There was supposed to be a plan for the Taliban to have their land and operate how they like on their land and leave the remainder of the country alone. There was no such plan incorporated. Now, the Taliban is notorious for not honoring agreements. So the plan needed to include a military response as a consequence. Clear and concise
boundaries.”
She also pointed out that the Afghanistan Study Group’s final report, published in February, also said that a “key objective of the ongoing U.S. military presence is to help create conditions for an acceptable peace agreement.”
But that didn’t happen, and now the country has been overrun.
Ms. Rogowski also questioned the outcome of the U.S. plan to accept some 60,000 Afghans with special immigrant visas.
“That’s how infiltration happens,” she said. “These people in Afghanistan and Iraq do not have identification cards or documented lineage. It makes vetting impossible. Anyone can come over here claiming to be a certain name and not actually be that person. The other issue at hand is the use of the same names. The family names are not as diverse as ours.”
Overall, she said, “I’m disappointed and angry all around.”
Republican members of Congress echoed the criticism.
“This military and humanitarian crisis was avoidable,” Rep. John Joyce, RBlair, said in a news release. “President Biden’s failure in leadership to protect the people of Afghanistan and promote our interests will have disastrous consequences for our national security and standing in the international community.
“The recent reports of human rights abuses are heartbreaking — and would have been preventable by a more robust strategy for American withdrawal.”
After Mr. Biden’s speech on the Kabul takeover on Monday afternoon, Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Butler, issued a statement that “President Biden’s speech did not address the core cause of what’s happening in Afghanistan right now. Many Americans, including me, agreed that we needed to withdraw our troops from this war-torn nation. The problem is that he carried out the withdrawal irresponsibly and in a manner that led to the collapse of the Afghan government in a matter of days.
“The president blamed everyone but himself for what occurred, including former President [Donald] Trump, Afghanistan’s political officials, its army, and its people. He then refused to take questions from the press. This is not what leadership looks like.”
But Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., said the focus should not be on politics right now.
“Our allies and defenders of democracy in Afghanistan are in grave danger, particularly women’s rights activists and leaders,” Mr. Casey said. “This is not the time for the usual Washington finger pointing and pontificating; our immediate priority must be to safely evacuate the Americans, women leaders, activists and human rights defenders who are being targeted by the Taliban. Once we have secured a safe evacuation for as many of our allies as possible, Congress should conduct a full review of mistakes made in Afghanistan over the course of 20 years.”