Afghanistan
continued
This was a historic moment to be sure, but it’s important we remember what happened between the signing of the “peace” deal in February 2020 and the September joint “peace” talks.
Between these two meetings, the Taliban launched multiple attacks on Afghanistan’s security forces, members of the government and judiciary, activists, journalists and religious leaders. They also attacked Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security – an intelligence complex located in the northern city of Aybak – killing 11 people and injuring over 60 more. On March 9, 2020, Afghanistan’s presidential inauguration day, the Taliban unleashed a barrage of mortar shells. ISIS-K continued its suicide bombing routine, including one at a funeral for a local police commander in the province of Nangarhar that killed 25 people and injured 68 more. There were other mass casualty attacks – both before and after the meeting between the Taliban and Afghan government – like the one at a tutoring center that murdered 44 people, one at Kabul University that killed 21, a truck bomb that killed 27 people in Kabul, and an attack on a Kandahar airfield.
Then there was this: Sayed Ul-Shuhada, an Afghan high school in Kabul, was bombed, killing at least 90 civilians and injuring almost 150 more – during the holy month of Ramadan, no less. Most of the victims were teenage girls innocently leaving class. There was also a mass casualty event so evil that even the Taliban or ISIS-K wouldn’t take credit for it: An attack on a maternity ward supported by Doctors Without Borders that killed brand new mothers, their newborn babies, medical staff, and a police officer. On June 16, 2021, at least 24 members of an Afghan elite force and five police officers were killed by the Taliban in Faryab Province. Ferdous Samim, whose best friend – a major in the Afghan security forces – was killed in the attack, spoke for many Afghans when he said: “We mourn. The Taliban celebrate. And it hurts too much.”
The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) reported 1,783 civilian casualties between January 1, 2021 and March 31, 2021 alone. This was a 29 percent increase from the same period the year before. The number of female casualties increased by 37 percent and child casualties were up 23 percent. There was a 38 percent increase in civilian casualties in the six months after the beginning of the Afghanistan “peace” negotiations in September 2020 compared to the same period the year before.
Before and after his speech, President Biden tried to distance himself from the hell that was unleashed in Afghanistan after the U.S. announced its withdrawal because, after all, he “inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban.” While it’s true the Trump administration signed a total joke of an agreement, the Biden administration didn’t have to abide by its terms because the Taliban was clearly in breach of every single provision.
You know how important it is to us that the United States honor our commitments, even bad ones that are passed from one presidential administration to the next. But the Taliban’s egregious actions – happening in real time and in plain sight – were in such violation of the February 2020 agreement that, in my mind, it was void practically from the moment it was signed. The Taliban’s failure to reduce violence and refusal to sever ties with al-Qaeda alone justifies this view.
We have now come to the second question involved in this conversation: After the decision was made to leave Afghanistan, how and why did the withdrawal go so horribly wrong?
Now that time has passed – and more and more information has come to light – there is only one answer to this: total incompetence. The defensive, accusatory and angry reaction of President Biden and his administration after the fact made it all look far worse, and their theme of “no one could have seen this coming” is downright absurd:
* President Biden on August 16, 2021: “The truth is: This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.”
* President Biden on August 22, 2021: “Let me be clear: The evacuation of thousands of people from Kabul is going to be hard and painful no matter when it started or when we began. It would have been true if we started a month ago or a month from now. There is no way to evacuate this many people without pain and loss – of heartbreaking images you see on television.”
What? No, seriously, what? Forget classified briefings and tactical strategy reports, does anyone in the White House even bother to read a newspaper? Watching and/or reading media coverage alone provided all the knowledge necessary to figure out that the Taliban had zero intention of playing it straight and never did. They had been on a murderous warpath through Afghanistan for months – capturing government military bases and entire command centers – and it’s not like they were even trying to keep it a secret.
In an outstanding example of journalism, The New York Times reported in August 2021 that: “In early May, a Taliban commander telephoned Muhammad Jallal, a tribal elder in Baghlan Province in northern Afghanistan, and asked him to deliver a message to Afghan government troops at several bases in his district. ‘If they do not surrender, we will kill them,’ Mr. Jallal said he was told.” In the article, Antonio Giustozzi, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London who has written multiple books about Afghanistan, explained the Taliban’s strategy: “They contacted everyone and offered the chance to surrender or switch sides, with incentives, including money and rewarding people with appointments afterward. A lot of money changed hands.”
Naturally, Mr. Jallal and other tribal elders ultimately complied, and the Taliban moved on to capture district after district, all the while gobbling up more weapons, ammunition, food and fuel. The Taliban was doing this with, by the way, with volunteer and financial support from Pakistan, Russia and Iran…which is just perfect, isn’t it? The result, The New York Times explains, was a “lopsided fight between an adaptable and highly mobile insurgent juggernaut, and a demoralized government force that had been abandoned by its leaders and cut off from help. Once the first provincial capital city surrendered this month, the big collapses came as fast as the Taliban could travel.”
We are not being Monday morning quarterbacks here. If sources for The New York Times knew this, you don’t think our own CIA did? Joe Biden had all the facts he needed back then. But following his playbook of passing the buck, he decided to blame his senior military advisors for the mess – which was just more insulting spin. Months before the withdrawal, CIA Director William J. Burns told the Senate Intelligence Committee that there was “significant risk” associated with it. “The U.S. government’s ability to collect and act on threats will diminish. That’s simply a fact.”
Despite President Biden telling ABC’s George Stephanopoulos – in response to a question asking if any military advisers had suggested we leave troops in Afghanistan – that “no one said that to me that I can recall,” we now know several did just that. In September 2021, General Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, then the commander of U.S. Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services committee under oath that his recommendation to President Biden was that the U.S. maintain a small force of 2,500 troops in Afghanistan. While he refrained from sharing his private conversations with the president, he did say that his personal view was that withdrawing those forces “would lead inevitably to the collapse of the Afghan military forces and, eventually, the Afghan government.” At the same hearing, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley said he agreed with the recommendation to leave troops in Afghanistan, although he refused to discuss or characterize any private conversations with the president.
In 2024, now retired General Austin Scott Miller, the top American general in Afghanistan during the withdrawal, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that he repeatedly warned the Biden administration that things would get “very bad, very fast” after U.S. troops departed. He was so worried by the administration’s “lack of understanding of the risk,” he said, that he warned those planning the possible evacuation to prepare for “really adverse conditions.”
This confirms what stellar journalists were reporting at the time. In April 2021, The New York Times reported that, after Biden announced to his advisors that he wanted all U.S. troops to be out of Afghanistan by September 11, 2021, this happened: “Over two decades of war that spanned four presidents, the Pentagon had always managed to fend off the political instincts of elected leaders frustrated with the grind of Afghanistan, as commanders repeatedly requested more time and more troops. The current military leadership < Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and General Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff > hoped it, too, could convince a new president to maintain at least a modest troop presence, trying to talk Mr. Biden into keeping a residual force and setting conditions on any withdrawal. But Mr. Biden refused to be persuaded. There would be no conditions put on the withdrawal, Mr. Biden told the men, cutting off the last thread – one that had worked with Mr. Trump – and that Mr. Austin and General Milley hoped could stave off a full drawdown.”
Four months later, The Wall Street Journal recounted the same scene, saying that, according to several administration and defense officials, Joe Biden’s decision to bring home U.S. troops was “made against the recommendations of his top military generals and many diplomats, who warned that a hasty withdrawal would undermine security in Afghanistan.” The article continued:
"The president’s top generals, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Mark Milley, urged Mr. Biden to keep a force of about 2,500 troops, the size he inherited, while seeking a peace agreement between warring Afghan factions, to help maintain stability. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who previously served as a military commander in the region, said a full withdrawal wouldn’t provide any insurance against instability. In a series of meetings leading up to his decision, military and intelligence officials told Mr. Biden that security was deteriorating in Afghanistan, and they expressed concerns both about the capabilities of the Afghan military and the Taliban’s likely ability to take over major Afghan cities. Other advisers, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, raised the possibility of Taliban attacks on U.S. forces and diplomats as well as the Afghans who for two decades worked alongside them. Ultimately, neither disagreed with the president, knowing where he stood."
The Wall Street Journal also reported that a July 2021 internal State Department memo, sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Director of Policy Planning Salman Ahmed “warned top agency officials of the potential collapse of Kabul soon after the United States’ August 31 troop withdrawal deadline in Afghanistan.” The memo also “warned of rapid territorial gains by the Taliban and the subsequent collapse of Afghan security forces and offered recommendations on ways to mitigate the crisis and speed up an evacuation.”
On August 18, 2021, The New York Times revealed that there were “drumbeats of warnings” over the summer: “Classified assessments by American spy agencies over the summer painted an increasingly grim picture of the prospect of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and warned of the rapid collapse of the Afghan military, even as President Biden and his advisers said publicly that was unlikely to happen as quickly, according to current and former American government officials. By July, many intelligence reports grew more pessimistic, questioning whether any Afghan security forces would muster serious resistance and whether the government could hold on in Kabul.”
Indeed, after the withdrawal, Marc Polymeropoulos, a veteran intelligence officer who served as a CIA base chief in Afghanistan told The Washington Post, “The counterterrorism posture went from problematic with the U.S. withdrawal to extraordinarily bad with the Taliban in full control. Suddenly one wonders if we will go entirely dark. It’s like a bad dream.”
The WP article also reported that another intelligence officer, who withheld his/her name over safety concerns, said the successful Taliban takeover was “encouraging many jihadists to think about traveling to Afghanistan now instead of Syria or Iraq.” The paper quoted one al-Qaeda fighter named Abu Khaled as saying, “God willing, the success of the Taliban will be also a chance to unify mujahideen movements like al-Qaeda and Daesh.” Well, that’s just awesome, isn’t it?
A senior counterterrorism official in the Trump administration Nathan Sales added this good news: “We are now back to 1998, where the Clinton administration was launching missiles at desert camps and hoping to hit something. That wasn’t enough to prevent 9/11 and returning to that is not a recipe for success.”
Even if President Biden didn’t fully grasp the severity of the destruction that would happen after an American withdrawal from Afghanistan – which, after what we just covered is in and of itself disqualifying – there was certainly enough evidence to know that U.S. troops had to stay until we had a solid plan for the evacuation of American citizens and our Afghan allies; to keep Bagram air base open until everyone was out; until we were sure that humanitarian efforts were coordinated between the U.S. and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); and until we were certain that the CIA had planned for new ways to gather intelligence and initiate counterterrorism strikes.
But nope. Instead of being a reliable ally, here’s Joe Biden, one last time: “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, Joe? Are you really going to stand in front of the entire world and essentially call Afghan soldiers cowards?
President Biden, it’s 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 – after YOU sealed their fates?
Since we are neither an Afghan nor a soldier, it’s more appropriate that you hear from someone who is both. General Sami Sadat, a three-star commander in the Afghan National Army, explained it this way in an August 25, 2021 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. He also lamented 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.”
The final nail in the coffin – and every American should pay close attention to this – was the sudden loss of logistical and maintenance support from America. Funny, in his condescending speech slapping the Afghan military in the face, 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.”
This is a total disgrace. Every single American should be mortified.
So, after hundreds of thousands dead, including thousands of American service members and civilian contractors, and after $825 billion in total military expenditure and another $130 billion spent on reconstruction projects – actually, $8 trillion dollars if you count all the post-9/11 wars and include direct Congressional war appropriations; war-related increases to the Pentagon base budget; veterans care and disability; increases in the homeland security budget; interest payments on direct war borrowing; foreign assistance spending; and estimated future obligations for veterans’ care – this is how it ended.
The United States of America snuck out of Bagram Airfield in the middle of the night, without telling General Mir Asadullah Kohistani, Bagram’s new commander. This allowed the Taliban to steal millions – if not billions – worth of military equipment that the United States provided Afghan forces, including Black Hawk helicopters, armored vehicles and drones. There was also highly informed speculation that the Taliban was in possession of biometric devices that could identify our Afghan partners. The United States of America 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.
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 – detailed “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.” In one of its last communications, the American embassy 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 fatal reality when 13 of our brave soldiers and scores of Afghan civilians were killed by dual explosions set by ISIS-K, 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.”
The Taliban started building their government – or what they call an “Islamic Emirate” – which included only Taliban hardliners. The prime minister is still Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund, who is on the United Nations blacklist, and their Interior Minister is still Sirajuddin Haqqani – the terrorist we mentioned earlier that has a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head and who is on our foreign terrorist list.
Even though Biden said in his speech 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 was just the opposite. China and Russia were thrilled by our withdrawal. A spokeswoman for China made clear that her country was 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 was 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 were, at best, shaken and, at worst, super pissed off…particularly Britain, the country that had 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 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 the 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 Germany’s conservative party 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.”
And what 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.