Why did the U.S. Exit Go So Wrong?
Joe Biden: “And here’s what I believe to my core: It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not…the Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision. American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”
This is a despicable thing to say. Really, Mr. President? Are you really going to stand in front of the entire world and essentially call Afghan soldiers cowards?
It is obvious you deeply love your children and grandchildren. What would you do if you were stuck out in the middle of nowhere — vastly outnumbered — and your wife, your parents and your children were looking down the barrel of a terrorist’s gun? Are you really blaming these people for handing over their weapons to stop the slaughter of their families?
Since none of us are Afghan soldiers on the ground, it’s far more appropriate that we all hear from someone who is. General Sami Sadat, a three-star commander in the Afghan National Army, explained it this way in a guest essay in The New York Times:
“For the past three and a half months, I fought day and night, nonstop, in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Province against an escalating and bloody Taliban offensive. Coming under frequent attack, we held the Taliban back and inflicted heavy casualties. Then I was called to Kabul to command Afghanistan’s special forces. But the Taliban already were entering the city; it was too late. I am exhausted. I am frustrated. And I am angry.
President Biden said last week that ‘American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.’ It’s true that the Afghan Army lost its will to fight. But that’s because of the growing sense of abandonment by our American partners and the disrespect and disloyalty reflected in Mr. Biden’s tone and words over the past few months. The Afghan Army is not without blame. It had its problems — cronyism, bureaucracy — but we ultimately stopped fighting because our partners already had.”
General Sadat went on to explain the reasons why the Afghan military — one that has lost over 66,000 troops in the war — collapsed, including political divisions in both Kabul and Washington and the February 2020 “peace” deal — which, as reminder, the Afghan government was completely left out of. In fact, the General says the deal “doomed” him and his men by pinpointing a date certain for withdrawal.
General Sadat also laments the corruption in the Afghan government (then led by Ashraf Ghani, who blew town early on in this mess), which he acknowledges is significant. He explains that most of the leaders in the Afghan government were there because of personal relationships, not experience:
“These appointments had a devastating impact on the national army because leaders lacked the military experience to be effective or inspire the confidence and trust of the men being asked to risk their lives. Disruptions to food rations and fuel supplies — a result of skimming and corrupt contract allocations — destroyed the morale of my troops.”
All that said, the final nail in the coffin — and this is where every American should really pay attention — was the sudden loss of logistical and maintenance support from the United States. Funny, in his condescending speech that dissed the Afghan military, Biden conveniently left this part out:
“Still, we kept fighting. But then Mr. Biden confirmed in April he would stick to Mr. Trump’s plan and set the terms for the U.S. drawdown. That was when everything started to go downhill.
The Afghan forces were trained by the Americans using the U.S. military model based on highly technical special reconnaissance units, helicopters and airstrikes. We lost our superiority to the Taliban when our air support dried up and our ammunition ran out.
Contractors maintained our bombers and our attack and transport aircraft throughout the war. By July, most of the 17,000 support contractors had left. A technical issue now meant that aircraft — a Black Hawk helicopter, a C-130 transport, a surveillance drone — would be grounded.
The contractors also took proprietary software and weapons systems with them. They physically removed our helicopter missile-defense system. Access to the software that we relied on to track our vehicles, weapons and personnel also disappeared. Real-time intelligence on targets went out the window, too.
The Taliban fought with snipers and improvised explosive devices while we lost aerial and laser-guided weapon capacity. And since we could not resupply bases without helicopter support, soldiers often lacked the necessary tools to fight. The Taliban overran many bases; in other places, entire units surrendered. Mr. Biden’s full and accelerated withdrawal only exacerbated the situation. It ignored conditions on the ground. The Taliban had a firm end date from the Americans and feared no military reprisal for anything they did in the interim, sensing the lack of U.S. will.
And so the Taliban kept ramping up. My soldiers and I endured up to seven Taliban car bombings daily throughout July and the first week of August in Helmand Province. Still, we stood our ground.”
General Sadat ended his essay with this: “We were betrayed by politics and presidents. This was not an Afghan war only; it was an international war, with many militaries involved. It would have been impossible for one army alone, ours, to take up the job and fight. This was a military defeat, but it emanated from political failure.”
So, after two decades, this is how it ended: The United States snuck out of Bagram Airfield in the middle of the night, without even telling General Mir Asadullah Kohistani, Bagram’s new commander.
We left an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 prisoners at Bagram — including many hard-core Taliban fighters and senior al-Qaeda operatives — whom the Taliban promptly released after they captured Bagram from the Afghan government without a fight. Meanwhile, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country with a reported $169 million in cash, and Americans lowered our flag at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, leaving it empty.
In one of its last communications, the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan issued a Security Alert warning that “the United States government could not ensure safe passage to the Hamid Karzai International Airport,” making Afghanistan a Level 4 security risk because of “civil unrest, armed conflict, crime, terrorism, kidnapping and Covid-19.” This warning turned into a devastating reality when 13 of our brave soldiers and scores of Afghan civilians were killed by dual explosions set by ISIS-Khorasan, making Thursday, August 26, 2021 the deadliest day in Afghanistan since 2011.
Soon thereafter, in northwestern Kabul, ten civilians from the same family — eight of them under the age of 18 — were killed in a U.S. drone strike meant for the Islamic State. The family’s neighbor described the scene: “The bodies were covered in blood and shrapnel, and some of the dead children were still inside the car.” A relative of the victims, Ahmad Fayaz, put it this way: “The United States ‘always says they are killing [the Islamic State], al-Qaeda or the Taliban, but they always attack civilian people and children. I don’t think they are good people.’”
When asked about the incident, the chief Pentagon spokesman, John F. Kirby, said, “We’re not in a position to dispute it.”
And remember the American University of Afghanistan? The Taliban have now taken over the entire campus and is on the hunt for the students who dared attend there. The school’s vice president of academic affairs Victoria Fontan told the radio network FranceInfo that, before school officials and faculty left, they “burned the university’s servers [and] all the documents we were able to take before leaving, such as the lists of professors, students.”
We have already covered the draconian rules and abject misery that females in Afghanistan face, and now images are starting to emerge of women and children who have very obviously been beaten. An incredibly brave group of women who staged a protest for women’s rights were reportedly attacked with rifle butts and metal clubs.
The few Afghans who were successfully evacuated before the U.S. withdrawal were taken to places like our military base in Doha, Qatar, where they sat sweltering, starving, and without proper sanitation. A leaked email sent from a member of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service to officials at the Pentagon and States Department — obtained by Axios — details “a life-threatening humanitarian disaster” caused by "conditions that are of our own doing.”
The email included assessments from members of the Doha U.S. Embassy staff, with one reporting this: “Where the Afghans are housed is a living hell. Trash, urine, fecal matter, spilled liquids and vomit cover the floors.”
The Taliban have stolen millions — if not billions — worth of military equipment that we provided Afghan forces, including Black Hawk helicopters, armored vehicles and drones. There is also highly informed speculation that the Taliban is in possession of biometric devices that can identify our Afghan partners.
The Taliban have started building their “government” — or what they call an “Islamic Emirate” — which so far is made up of only hard-core Taliban hardliners. The prime minister is Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund, who is on the United Nations blacklist, and their new Interior Minister is Sirajuddin Haqqani — the terrorist we mentioned earlier that has a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head and who is on our foreign terrorist list.
Even though, in his speech, Biden said that “our true strategic competitors, China and Russia, would love nothing more than the United States to continue to funnel billions of dollars in resources and attention into stabilizing Afghanistan indefinitely,” it’s actually just the opposite. China and Russia are thrilled by our withdrawal.
A spokeswoman for China made clear that her country is ready to foster a “friendly and cooperative” relationship with Afghanistan. “The Taliban have repeatedly expressed their hope to develop good relations with China, and that they look forward to China’s participation in the reconstruction and development of Afghanistan. We welcome this. China respects the right of the Afghan people to independently determine their own destiny and is willing to continue to develop... friendly and cooperative relations with Afghanistan.”
For his part, Vladimir Putin took the opportunity to scold us, saying this is even more proof that the West needs to stop its “irresponsible policy of imposing someone’s outside values from abroad.”
Our allies around the world are, at best, shaken and, at worst, super pissed off…particularly Britain, the country that has been the second-largest supplier of troops to Afghanistan and the one that has had the second-most casualties from the war. Despite that, the Biden administration kept Britain largely in the dark as to how and when the U.S. would leave Afghanistan.
Rory Stewart, a former British cabinet minister with lengthy experience in Afghanistan, put it this way, “(Biden) hasn’t just humiliated America’s Afghan allies. He’s humiliated his Western allies by demonstrating their impotence.” Ben Wallace, Britain’s defense secretary who also served as a captain in the British Army, “I’m a soldier. It’s sad that the West has done what it’s done.”
Conservative member of Parliament and head of the British Foreign Affairs Committee Tom Tugendhat said that these actions by the United States were the “biggest foreign policy disaster” since the 1956 Suez crisis. He wasn’t finished: “We need to think again about how we handle friends, who matters and how we defend our interests.”
The chairman of the Defense Committee in the British Parliament Tobias Ellwood perhaps put it the most succinctly, “Whatever happened to ‘America is back’?”
The chairman of the German Parliament’s Foreign Relations Committee said the U.S. withdrawal was “a serious and far-reaching miscalculation by the (Biden) administration” and that these actions have done “fundamental damage to the political and moral credibility of the West.” The head of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative party, and most likely her replacement, Armin Laschet called the withdrawal “the greatest debacle that NATO has experienced since its foundation.”
Even Latvia’s defense minister weighed in: “This kind of troop withdrawal causes chaos…unfortunately, the West, and Europe in particular, are showing they are weaker globally.”
So, this is what has happened since we left Afghanistan. Almost immediately, the Taliban started hanging the bloody corpses of executed “criminals” in town squares. This, after the Taliban announced they would bring back not only public executions, but amputations as well. Human Rights Watch reported that Taliban forces had been systematically executing or forcibly “disappearing” former police and intelligence officers. Thousands upon thousands of Taliban fighters had swarmed into Afghanistan from Pakistan at the urging of clerics and commanders.
Less than four months after the Taliban takeover, high schools for girls were closed indefinitely, the Afghan economy was in shambles and 23 million Afghans were experiencing extreme food insecurity. In fact, the United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said that “ninety-five percent” of the country “did not have enough to eat.” He also said that Afghan families had resorted to selling some of their children to feed the rest of the family.
Meanwhile, Afghanistan’s drug trade was and is still exploding. Already, Afghanistan supplied around 80 percent of global opiate users, but now the Taliban is positioned to expand their operations even more with the discovery of a native plant called ephedra (known locally as oman). Ephedra is a natural source of the key ingredient used in methamphetamine.
As 2021 ended, thousands of Afghan families were still apart and over 60,000 interpreters who supported the United States during the war were still in Afghanistan, even though at least 33,000 of them had already been vetted and approved for evacuation. It is virtually impossible to get a clean number on this today…it’s almost as if people in Washington don’t give a damn about righting this wrong anymore.
But the scariest thing is the persistent threat of terrorist activity. The latest Annual Threat Assessment, released by the Office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence on February 2022, warns: “Foreign Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists (REMVE) very likely will continue to pose a threat to the United States and its allies. These actors continue to rely on transnational ties and adapt violent extremist narratives around current events, including the U.S. and coalition departure from Afghanistan last August.”
As reported by The Washington Post, thanks to The Discord Leaks — where an airman in the 102nd Intelligence Wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard Jack Teixeira leaked dozens of highly classified U.S. documents online — we now know that Afghanistan “has become a significant coordination site for the Islamic State as the terrorist group plans attacks across Europe and Asia, and conducts ‘aspirational plotting’ against the United States.”
“The attack planning reveals specific efforts to target embassies, churches, business centers and the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament, which drew more than 2 million spectators last summer in Qatar. Pentagon officials were aware in December of nine such plots coordinated by ISIS leaders in Afghanistan, and the number rose to 15 by February.
ISIS has been developing a cost-effective model for external operations that relies on resources from outside Afghanistan, operatives in target countries, and extensive facilitation networks,” says the assessment, which is labeled top-secret and bears the logos of several Defense Department organizations. “The model will likely enable ISIS to overcome obstacles — such as competent security services — and reduce some plot timelines, minimizing disruption opportunities.”
And how about the Taliban’s “promise” in the Doha Agreement not to harbor terrorists in Afghanistan… how is that going? Not great. On July 30, 2022, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda and one of the world’s most-wanted terrorists, was killed in an American drone strike... right in the middle of downtown Kabul.