American boots hit the ground in Afghanistan (again) on October 19, 2001. The war that followed cost the United States trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. At one point, over 100,000 U.S. troops were stationed there.

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Then came August 15, 2021, the day the Taliban took control of Kabul, the capital.

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We covered President Trump’s betrayal of our faithful allies, the Syrian Democratic Forces, in the Syria section. But not long after, one of the worst foreign policy failures in American history took place in Afghanistan – starting from the moment the Trump administration started its sham “peace” talks with the Taliban, to the shame of August 15th, when the Taliban completed their takeover of the country.

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… and America’s shameful behavior continues today. For two decades, hundreds of thousands of Afghans risked their lives to serve alongside us, whether it be cooking, driving, providing security, or serving as journalists, interpreters, or cultural advisers. In exchange for their invaluable help, the United States promised these brave men and women that we would not leave them behind to suffer for their loyalty to us. And suffer we knew they would. Terribly. Even as they were negotiating their joke of a “peace” agreement with the Trump administration, the Taliban made it clear that anyone who had helped the U.S. during the war would be put to death, and they wasted no time acting on that threat.

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The Norwegian Center for Global Analyses – an organization supported by the United Nations – reported well before America’s final withdrawal deadline that the Taliban had been “intensifying the hunt-down of all individuals and collaborators with the former regime,” going door-to-door to find and kill our faithful partners. If their original target wasn’t around, they just harassed and/or harmed their target’s family members until they finally arrived to face their fate.

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American veterans, refugee advocates, members of Congress, and human rights organizations had also been sounding the warning – loudly – for months and months that these faithful Afghans were in danger of being left for dead.

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The 2024 presidential election had its share of twists and turns but, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris – who prided herself as being the last person in the room when Biden decided to withdraw from Afghanistan – and Donald Trump should have all been disqualified from being the commander-in-chief. Through their actions and inactions, they sealed the fates of our loyal allies – and Donald Trump continues to essentially sign many of their death certificates.

 

When we left, over 60,000 of these brave souls were still left in Afghanistan, even though at least 33,000 of them had already been vetted and approved for evacuation. Today, four years later, tens of thousands of them are still waiting for the United States to make good on our promise.

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Our pledge took yet another leap backward when, on the first day of his second term, President Trump signed an executive order named Realigning the United States Refugee Admission Program, which stopped refugee flights for these Afghans. According to AfghanEvac, a volunteer group that offers aid to these Afghans and their families, over 2,000 Afghans would have been resettled in the United States over the three months following the order.

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One of these Afghan partners – a man named Nasir, a lieutenant colonel who was a legal adviser to the Afghan Air Force during the war, and who has been in Afghanistan living in hiding – said in a text message to The New York Times that Donald Trump had “not only disregarded the interests of Afghans in this decision, but also failed to consider the interests of the United States.” How, we wondered, “can the world and America’s allies rely on the U.S. government?”

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Four months after Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the United States would terminate the temporary protected status (TPS) for Afghans in the United States, saying there had been “notable improvements” in Afghanistan and that conditions there no longer meet statutory requirements (this is a ludicrous thing to say, which I’ll prove later in this section). This means that over 9,600 Afghans now face deportation back to a place where their lives are in imminent danger. Even Afghans who are allowed to stay until their asylum cases or Special Immigrant Visas are processed are now required to pay thousands of dollars a year in fees.

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We guess we shouldn’t be surprised by the callousness of our leaders because it’s not like they haven’t done this type of thing before. After we left Vietnam, for example, the North Vietnamese communists threw 300,000 of our South Vietnamese partners in prison, subjecting them to horrendous treatment, including starvation, torture and death. After the first Gulf War, we abandoned the Kurds, leaving them to be slaughtered by Saddam Hussein. In 2011, when our combat troops left Iraq, our government failed to issue even a fraction of the U.S. visas authorized for the loyal allies who helped us. After our exit, an estimated 1,000 Iraqi interpreters were murdered in retribution.

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During those first days after the Taliban takeover, it was upsetting enough to see/hear the heartbreaking images/stories coming out of Afghanistan – but President Biden’s speech on the following Monday was downright disgraceful.

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…you know, the speech where he said, “I am the President of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me,” but then proceeded to blame everyone and everything else for the chaos and drama, from U.S. intelligence agencies to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, the leader of the Afghan High Council for National Reconciliation, to the Afghan people themselves. Biden also blamed the Afghan military forces, which he claimed had 300,000 active troops but, according to the International Institute of Strategic Studies, really had less than 178,800 (the White House later explained that Biden’s number included the Afghan National Police, whose responsibilities were very different from those of the military).

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Regardless of how surprised he seemed to be by the pandemonium of the withdrawal, it should have come as no shock to Biden because the Center for Strategic and International Studies had been warning for months that, of those less than 178,800 troops, only a “small fraction” could be used “effectively” – an assessment that certainly came as no surprise to our military brass, who had known this for a very long time.

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In fact, six years before we left, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) was already warning that, thanks to a reduction of U.S. military and civilian personnel on the ground, neither the United States nor its Afghan allies knew exactly how many Afghan soldiers and police were available for duty, or what their operational expertise and capabilities were.

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Sadly, the manipulation of this very important fact fit a pattern that the Biden administration repeatedly fell into while desperately trying to deflect responsibility for the latest tragedy to befall Afghanistan. In the months before the Taliban takeover, for example, Biden administration officials gave at least nine different explanations for the excruciatingly slow – and now completely failed – process of the evacuation of our faithful Afghan partners.

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Not to toot our own horns, but long ago we devised a failsafe solution to our predicament in Afghanistan: Have those smart tech guys invent a time machine and travel back to 2001. Once there, make the decision to significantly limit U.S. ground forces in Afghanistan and instead focus on air strikes on al-Qaeda and Taliban forces – in partnership with the Northern Alliance, Pashtun, and other anti-Taliban forces – much like we did at the very beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom.

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Meanwhile, the CIA and U.S. Special Forces would focus on hunting down Osama bin Laden and the others responsible for the 9/11 attacks, keeping a laser-focus on terrorists and those who harbor them. We wouldn’t go into Iraq, of course, which would only divide our resources and focus. We would help Afghanistan stabilize and become a civil society, but we would not tolerate corruption on any level from the new Afghan government. We would have a smart fiscal strategy and not waste billions and billions of dollars.

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But, unfortunately, even the smartest tech guys can’t invent time machines, So, like it or not, we have no choice but to play the hand we are dealt by those who come before us (which means we better start electing better leaders). The inconvenient truth is that we did go into Afghanistan and with that lethal decision comes responsibility, whether Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or Donald Trump like it or not.