Disaster in Afghanistan will follow us back home
What on earth was Joe Biden thinking — if, that is, he was thinking?
On July 8, the president defended his decision to withdraw all remaining U.S. forces from Afghanistan. After assuring Americans that “the drawdown is proceeding in a secure and orderly way” and that “U.S. support for the people of Afghanistan will endure,”
he took some questions. Here are excerpts from the White House transcript.
Q: Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?
The president: No, it is not.
Q: Why?
The president: Because you — the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable. …
Q: Do you see any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam, with some people feeling ...
The president: None whatsoever. Zero … The Taliban is not the South — the North Vietnamese Army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy. …
Biden’s heedlessness, on the cusp of a sweeping Taliban blitzkrieg, will define his administration’s first great fiasco. It won’t matter that he is carrying through on the shambolic withdrawal agreement negotiated last year by the Trump administration.
This is happening on Biden’s watch, at Biden’s insistence, against the advice of his senior military advisers and with Biden’s firm assurance to the American people that what has just come to pass wouldn’t come to pass.
The killing won’t stop. Watch — if you have the stomach — videos of the aftermath of an attack in May on Afghan schoolgirls, which left 90 dead, or the massacre of 22 Afghan commandos in June, gunned down as they were surrendering.
Women will become chattel. There are roughly 18 million women and girls in Afghanistan. They will now be subject to laws from the seventh century.
Afghanistan will become a magnet to jihadists everywhere.
“The relationship between the Taliban and alQaida will get stronger,” Saad Mohseni, the head of the Afghan news and media company Moby, told me on Saturday. “Why should the Taliban fear the Americans anymore? What’s the worst that could happen? Another invasion?”
What happens in Afghanistan won’t stay there. The country most immediately at risk from an ascendant Taliban is neighboring Pakistan.
Short of this, the calamity in Afghanistan is a recipe for another wave of migrants, one that will wash over Europe’s shores and provoke a populist backlash. “We’re going to see 20 Viktor Orbans emerge,” warned Mohseni, referring to the Hungarian strongman and Tucker Carlson BFF.
America’s geopolitical position will be gravely damaged. What kind of ally is the United States? In the last several years, the United States has maintained a relatively small force in Afghanistan, largely devoted to providing surveillance, logistics and air cover for Afghan forces while taking minimal casualties.
In other words, we had achieved a good-enough solution for a nation we could afford to neither save nor lose. We squandered it anyway.
But didn’t we have to leave Afghanistan sometime? Yes, though we’ve been in Korea for 71 years.
But wasn’t the Afghan government corrupt and inept? Yes, but at least that government wasn’t massacring its own citizens or raising the banner of jihad.
But aren’t American casualties unacceptable? They are surely tragic. But so is squandering the sacrifice of so many Americans who fought the Taliban bravely and nobly — and, as it turns out, for nothing.
The war in Afghanistan isn’t just over. It’s lost. A few Americans may cheer this humiliation. But the consequences are rarely benign for nations, no matter how powerful they otherwise appear to be. America’s enemies, great and small, will draw conclusions from our needless surrender, just as they will about the oblivious president who brought it about.