Joe Biden falls far short of pledges

John Howard, a stalwart of the Australia-US alliance whose government invoked the ANZUS alliance and committed Australian troops to Afghanistan after al-Qa’ida’s terror attacks on the US on September 11, 2001, is incisive and fair in his criticism of President Joe Biden over the shambolic fall of Kabul. The US withdrawal was “too hasty’’, as Mr Howard says on Friday. Donald Trump also was to blame for making the “terrible mistake of saying that America was going before he secured any kind of understanding or deal with the Taliban”. Mr Biden should have committed to leaving a small US military force in ­Afghanistan to “stiffen the ­resolve” of the Afghan army. Doing so might have slowed the capitulation of the Afghan forces and resulted in a less chaotic end, Mr Howard says.

For all Mr Biden’s pre-election promises to “reassert American leadership to combat authoritarianism and global instability”, his handling of the exit from Afghanistan has been everything he accused Mr Trump of in foreign policy – “shortsighted, incompetent and ultimately threatening to US interests and democracy across the world”. In his inaugural address, Mr Biden promised Americans he would “always level with you”. They, in turn, hoped he was too experienced, too grounded in reality and too committed to the truth on principle and too respectful of the public to paint false scenarios. On July 8, in his now-infamous statement at a press conference, Mr Biden said: “The Taliban is not 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 … from Afghanistan.” A Taliban takeover was not inevitable, he said. There were “zero” parallels with Vietnam.

Little more than a month later, with US helicopters ignominiously evacuating people from the US embassy, Mr Biden tried to shrug off the humiliation: “One more year, or five more years, of US military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country.” But that cannot excuse the irresponsible ineptitude of the withdrawal of the world’s most powerful military force, belonging to the world’s largest economy.

Allies and opponents of the US are discerning a pattern. Despite high-minded rhetoric on the world stage, Mr Biden falls short in practice. Just over a week ago, for example, he announced he was convening a global Leaders’ Summit for Democracy to discuss the “challenge of our time … to demonstrate that democracies can deliver by improving the lives of their own people and by addressing the greatest problems facing the wider world”. The summit, on December 9 and 10, would “rally the work to stand up against human rights abuses”. Just four days later, Mr Biden’s disorganised retreat from Kabul handed Afghanistan’s almost 40 million people – and the aspirations of many of them, especially women and girls – to the Taliban. It remains to be seen how seriously other nations take the summit.

At this stage the administration appears to be in denial about, or dangerously unaware of, how badly the manner of its departure from Afghanistan has eroded the US’s international standing. As Australian Strategic Policy Institute executive director Peter Jennings told a parliamentary committee on Thursday, the hit from Afghanistan would have repercussions: “It’s very hard to see how the US can sort of elegantly pivot from that and now say, well here we are in the Indo-Pacific region then, by golly, we’re going to take security issues seriously there. I think this is a jab in the solar plexus on all of America’s allies.” Since the retreat, Chinese state media has warned Taiwanese secessionists that they, too, would be left behind by the Biden regime.

In April, Mr Biden said the reasons for the US remaining in Afghanistan had become increasingly unclear since the killing of Osama bin Laden (in Pakistan) in 2011. The US could not maintain a major military operation indefinitely. And Mr Biden’s view underlines why he needed to lead an orderly strategy to wind down. But the sight of desperate Afghans apparently falling from US military aircraft departing Kabul will be one of the abiding memories of Mr Biden’s presidency.