This was a capitulation. The US surrender to the Taliban is a Trump-Biden project. Donald Trump is the architect of this folly and Joe Biden is the agent of this surrender. There can be no excuse and no justification based on “forever war” apologia.
This will leave the US weaker, not stronger. Biden’s capitulation testifies to a superpower that has lost its will and its way. America’s unity, integrity and self-belief – necessary to sustain global leadership – is corroded from within, a story unfolding for nearly 20 years.
Biden didn’t believe in the Afghanistan commitment. In the end his visceral disbelief turned into something else – a disastrous withdrawal, defying military advice, guaranteeing a wave of distrust of the US, betraying the Afghan people and handing America’s enemies a strategic gift. The world knew it couldn’t trust Trump and now it knows it cannot trust Biden.
The sooner Australia’s national security establishment confronts the political and moral equivocation at the heart of today’s America, the sooner Australia can begin to address the revolutionary change in our strategic outlook.
There are three sure consequences from the Taliban’s victory – it will reinforce the global propaganda from China that America is hostage to decline and internal weakness; it will strengthen the hand of jihadists and terrorists around the world; and it will deepen the doubts of America’s alliance partners, who will know that what matters are Biden’s actions, not his words.
Every sign is that Biden’s withdrawal decision – despite the irresponsible ineptitude that defines it – will be popular with the American public. The core decision is what the bulk of the Democratic Party wanted. It is what the progressive establishment and media sought. It is what Trump’s devoted “America First” isolationist legions demanded. After the immediate chaos subsides there will be a flood of phony realists praising Biden for his courage.
Don’t be fooled by partisans saying it is all Trump’s fault or all Biden’s fault. This decision is validated by a weary, emotionally and morally fraught America whose backbone is fractured by domestic traumas, such that presidents as different as Trump and Biden came together in unison on betrayal of Afghanistan.
This has been Biden’s most revealing decision as commander-in-chief. It is deeply personal. What was it all about? For Biden, it is about the healing process – he saw retreat from Afghanistan as pivotal to his restoration of America. It’s a shocking miscalculation – capitulation as the path to renewal. Biden will find his means only condemn his ends.
Afghanistan began as a war of necessity and it ends as a withdrawal of choice. When Biden became President US forces numbered about 3000. As US analyst Richard Haass said, the US presence was still welcomed by the host government, the US military posture was neither untenable on the ground nor domestically intolerable in the US given there had been no American fatality since February last year.
Afghanistan was contested territory, with the Taliban and the Afghan government strong in their respective spheres. The US military role had a dual purpose – to train the Afghan forces and to function as a political and bargaining sheet anchor in any negotiating process about the future government.
The US military involvement was limited, far below the 110,000 troops under president Barack Obama at one point. America was not going to defeat the Taliban but it was denying the Taliban. As Haass said: “Sometimes what matters in foreign policy is not what you can accomplish but what you can avoid.” In the presidential election last year there were no mass protests against the Afghan war. It was never a frontline issue.
But it was always a frontline issue for Biden. This decision reveals two things about Biden – when set, he is a stubborn man; and his foreign policy judgment is weak, emotional and inept.
US journalist George Packer recounted Biden angrily telling master diplomat Richard Holbrooke about Afghanistan: “I am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights.”
Biden opposed the first Gulf war in 1991, one of the most justified wars in history. He supported the second Gulf war in Iraq in 2003, one of the most disastrous wars in history that also undermined the Afghan campaign, and he aggressively opposed Obama’s 2009 “surge” of extra US forces to Afghanistan.
Former US defence secretary Robert Gates said Biden had been wrong on “nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades”.
In Monday’s defence of his decision amid chaos in Kabul, Biden got populist and vicious. “We gave them every chance to determine their own future,” he said of the Afghans. “What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.” So much for the dead Afghans who sacrificed their lives.
It is a half-truth at best. What happened was that Trump did a craven, defeatist deal with the Taliban. It excluded the Afghan government, imposed virtually no conditions on the enemy and pledged withdrawal of US troops by May this year. This agreement was a naked betrayal. Calling it a peace agreement was a gigantic lie and a hopeless fig leaf.
But it suited Biden who, having taken delight in repudiating so many Trump positions, declared he had no choice but to honour Trump’s deal. Biden said the only alternative was sending thousands of US troops back into combat and continuing the war for generations, hyperbole that nobody believes.
Having lost the war, Biden now says the loss was inevitable. How very convenient. He now abuses the Afghans he has stabbed in the back. The Afghan army and government gave up because Trump and Biden adopted surrender as their policy. Can there be a thread of honesty about what happened?
The US made many mistakes in Afghanistan. Biden is right on a decisive point – America blundered in expanding its mission to seek a nation-building unified democracy when its task should have been more narrowly focused. But how do you recover from such mistakes?
Not by Biden’s answer. This was not just a shameful withdrawal that handed the country over to the enemy whose removal was the reason for the original US intervention. The bottom line is that Biden expected to lose the war. He just lost sooner than he anticipated.
Trump’s sellout and Biden’s capitulation come from deep within the US governing culture. This is about America as much as it is about Afghanistan. We should beware Washington’s assurances that its release from the Afghanistan quagmire means a stronger US engaging in the Indo-Pacific.
You’re either a global leader or you’re not. You either have the resilience, cohesion, leadership and self-sacrificing of a great power or you’re just pretending. America recovered so fast, so brilliantly after the 1975 Vietnam debacle.
Hopefully, history will repeat itself because the world desperately needs an America that can lead. But this omen is profoundly discouraging.
You can hear the podcast of all Paul Kelly’s columns in the Podcasts section of The Australian’s app. App users can swipe to Podcasts and hit +Follow on Paul Kelly: Columns. Download the app via: Apple App Store | Google Play Store.
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