Duck and Cover

The Biden administration is shirking its share of the blame for America’s abandonment of its Afghan allies.

At best, the Biden administration’s accounting of the disgraceful American exodus from Afghanistan is a disappointment. At worst, its attempt to dump most of the blame for the debacle on the Trump administration is a disgrace.

That’s not to say that the charge against the previous administration is trumped up. The Doha Agreement that Donald Trump cut with the Taliban and his decision to abandon Afghanistan posthaste not only was impatient; it also was imprudent, ignorant and idiotic.

The Biden administration’s claim that it had no choice but to follow in Trump’s footsteps, however, ignores Sir Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion: A body, or in this case a policy, will remain in motion in a straight line and at a constant speed — unless it is acted upon by an opposing force. For almost eight months after Biden took office, there was no opposing force.

That was not because, as the 12-page report on the “U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan” suggests, American military and intelligence officers all agreed that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s government and the country’s U.S.-trained and equipped National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) would successfully fight the Taliban and defend Kabul, their capital.

If there was such unanimity in the upper reaches of the Biden administration, it bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the upper reaches of the Bush administration’s shared belief that Saddam Hussein had an active weapons of mass destruction program and ties to al Qaeda. In both cases, as I wrote recently in Foreign Affairs (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iraq/journalism-press-failed-iraq-walcott), political appointees in Washington — and many journalists — once again either failed to listen to the ground truth or ignored it.

Almost from the day Biden took office in January 2021, military and intelligence officers with expertise and experience in Afghanistan warned repeatedly about the fragility of Ghani’s corruption-riddled government and the dubious resilience of the ANDSF.

In mid-June 2021, based on those warnings, I wrote this, which never found a home (my bad):

“Despite months of talk and interagency meetings, White House officials have made no decisions about how to get tens of thousands of Afghans who supported the international effort to establish a stable democracy in Kabul out of harm’s way. Some military officials and diplomats say it already may be too late to prevent a humanitarian and political disaster.

“President Biden will meet on June 24 with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, the chairman of the country’s High Council for Reconciliation, but the greatest obstacles to – and responsibility for -- getting Afghans who cooperated with the U.S. and its allies since 2001 to safety lie in Washington, not in Kabul.

“Publicly, administration officials have estimated that the U.S. and its allies will have six months after Biden’s Sept. 11 final withdrawal date to provide safe haven to interpreters, drivers and others. Privately, U.S. intelligence and military officers have warned in classified briefings that Ghani’s government and the country’s security forces could collapse in six weeks, or even in days.

“Already, said two U.S. intelligence officials who requested anonymity to discuss classified matters, Afghan soldiers are deserting, joining or rejoining the Taliban at an accelerating rate, and some officers have begun handing over weapons and pay intended for their troops to the Islamic extremists in an effort to safeguard themselves and their families. The recent massacre of an entire Afghan special forces unit by Taliban fighters has sent a shiver through the ranks, said one senior American military officer who works with the Afghan forces (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/death-of-famed-afghan-commander-in-taliban-massacre-highlights-the-country-e2-80-99s-struggles-and-fears/ar-AALdwwN).

“Although the administration has doubled its effort to issue Special Immigrant Visas to the 18,000 Afghans who’ve applied for them, military officials privately warn that a collapse of Ghani’s government and the country’s security forces could endanger at least three times that number and perhaps as many as 150,000 Afghans. Private contractors alone employ some 5,000 Afghans, according to a report from John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghan wreconstruction, and one internal estimate puts the total number of Afghans and their relatives at risk as high as 154,000. 

“‘It’s not just the folks on the payrolls who’re at risk of Taliban revenge,” said one senior official who requested anonymity to criticize the administration’s lack of progress. “It’s also their immediate families, their extended families, and maybe even neighbors who didn’t report them to the Taliban.

“Nevertheless, officials in multiple U.S. departments and agencies say privately, the administration has yet to devise a whole-of-government approach to providing safe haven to Afghans and their families who over the last 20 years have risked their lives to assist the military, the CIA, the State Department, the Agency for International Development, other agencies, international organizations, private contractors, and even news companies. As of June 17,  the administration had not even designated a lead agency to oversee an evacuation.

“While administration officials talk publicly about providing air cover to Afghan forces and civilians retreating from advancing Taliban fighters, military and intelligence officers concede that the loss of agents on the ground, coupled at some times by bad weather, have made it more difficult to target advancing Taliban forces. To make matters worse, said one military officer working the problem, as the Talibs advance, they become more intermingled with innocent civilians, whom the official called ‘the best cover they could ask for’.

“Further compounding the problem, officials say, the Afghan air force cannot function without continued training, maintenance and other support from private contractors (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/19/world/asia/Afghanistan-withdrawal-contractors.html?referringSource=articleShare.)

“While negotiations continue, U.S. military and intelligence officials and diplomats say they expect limited, if any, covert support from neighboring Pakistan, a longtime backer of the Taliban that harbored Osama bin Laden, or from the former Soviet republics that border Afghanistan and supported the U.S. invasion in 2001.

“We can’t expect the same level of cooperation now,” said one administration official. ‘Twenty years ago, Russia was OK with them letting us use their turf because it was a way to get even with the Taliban (who drove Soviet forces out of Afghanistan in 1989), and now China’s Belt and Road initiative has given it more clout in those areas.

“Senior officials in the Defense Department, the military’s Central Command and the State Department have been studying the deteriorating situation for months, and while DOD has assessed the logistical resources needed to mount a mass evacuation resembling the final U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975, they say the White House has yet to decide on a coordinated plan for their agencies and others.

“These officials attribute the indecision to distraction, not callousness or fear of adding another immigration issue to the domestic political agenda during the protracted negotiations over an infrastructure plan. They say Biden, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken and other top officials have focused on other important issues, and are going to be ‘blindsided’ by the unfolding humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan, as one official put it.

Some in Congress also saw the gathering storm. On June 16, 2021, Reps. Michael Waltz, R-FL, and Jason Crow, D-CO, held a joint news conference pressing the administration to start evacuating interpreters. ‘If [Biden] does not act and does not get these people out, blood will be on his hands and his administration’s hands,’ said Waltz.

Instead, that job was left to an ad hoc alliance of current and former military, intelligence and Foreign Service officers; journalists; aid workers and others who until the Taliban took over used a little-known gate to the Kabul airport to smuggle out Afghan translators, drivers, fixers and others.

On the receiving end in America, churches, synagogues, mosques and humanitarian organizations have assumed much of the work of finding housing, jobs, schools, cars, clothing, English language lessons and other essentials to Afghanis who in many cases had risked their lives to help the U.S.-led crusade.

No one will say that this was America’s finest hour, but there is plenty of blame to go around, beginning with the Bush administration’s ill-advised decision to turn the hunt for bin Laden into a nation-building exercise while simultaneously invading Iraq. It’s not surprising that Trump, as usual, has failed to acknowledge his mistakes, but it’s disappointing that the Biden administration has not found the courage to accept its fair share of responsibility for the tragedy.