What Becomes of the Afghans?
Biden used to profess concern for human rights in Afghanistan. His drastic withdrawal policy suggests otherwise.
After twenty years of fighting, the Taliban still controls about one-fifth of the territory of Afghanistan, and itās likely stronger than at any point since 2001. Meanwhile, the Afghan government is still mired in corruption and its security forces have proven incapable of resisting the Talibanās advances across the country. Afghanistan is the United Statesā longest warāa significant proportion of the American military was born after the 9/11 attacks. These are just a few of the reasons why itās understandable for Americans to feel that the war should have ended long ago, but theyāre also the reasons President Joe Biden is about to make a disastrous mistake by completely withdrawing from the country.
As the Biden administration prepares to remove all remaining U.S. forces from Afghanistan on the twentieth anniversary of September 11, the United States and its partners just have to hope that the Taliban will no longer allow al Qaeda or other terror groups to operate from territory under its control. This hope is almost certainly in vain. A recent United Nations report found that the Taliban still has a strong relationship with al Qaeda. But at least the Taliban has an incentive (avoiding the redeployment of U.S. troops) to prevent al Qaeda and other terror groups from launching attacks from Afghanistan. The hope for Afghan civil society and all the people who have fought for years to move the country from a backward theocracy toward a more modern and pluralistic state is even dimmer. These are the people about whom President Biden expressed a level of indifference bordering on contempt when he said āour reasons for remaining in Afghanistan are becoming increasingly unclearā during his address to the nation about the withdrawal.
Those who wish to see the United States out of Afghanistan regard the length of the war as a grim absurdity, as if the exit strategy has been obvious all along. Biden captured this attitude well when he observed that Osama bin Laden has been dead since 2011: āThat was 10 years ago. Think about that. We delivered justice to bin Laden a decade ago, and weāve stayed in Afghanistan for a decade since.ā Bidenās incredulity about the fact that the United States stayed in Afghanistan after the raid that killed bin Laden (which he counseled against) betrays a refusal to acknowledge the wrenching trade-offs that have always defined the war.
After September 11, there was significant international support for military action against the Taliban. NATO invoked its collective defense provision for the first time in its history, world leaders lined up behind the United States, and the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan consisted of 130,000 troops from 50 countries at its height. There was also overwhelming domestic support for the war, with 80 percent of Americans backing a ground invasion in November 2001āan invasion then-Senator Biden voted for and strongly supported. Despite his suggestion that the United States had no business in Afghanistan beyond ādeliver[ing] justiceā to bin Laden, Biden had a radically different view several months after the invasion: āSecurity is the basic issue in Afghanistan,ā he said in February 2002. āWhatever it takes, we should do it. History will judge us harshly if we allow the hope of a liberated Afghanistan to evaporate because we failed to stay the course.ā
During the 2008 Democratic primary, Biden mocked Barack Obama for his āJohnny-Come-Lately Positionā on sending more troops and aid to Afghanistan, pointing out that he had co-authored the first bill which authorized reconstruction assistance (his early demand for billions in aid to Afghanistan was rebuffed) and boasting about his calls for more investment and a greater commitment of U.S. forces. But after he became vice president, Biden almost immediately reversed his position. When the time came to decide whether the Obama administration would authorize a troop surge in late 2009, Biden told the president that sending a large influx of U.S. forces to Afghanistan was a catastrophic mistake. Biden became the in-house skeptic on Afghanistan from that point onward, arguing that the corruption of Hamid Karzaiās government was intractable, expressing doubt that the United States could stabilize the country with more time and troops, and making the case for a modest deployment focused on counterterrorism forces instead.
To the extent that Biden ever cared about human rights in Afghanistan, this concern disappeared when he became vice presidentāthe latest in a string of reconfigurations of his principles and priorities. In the early 1990s, Biden pushed for intervention in Bosnia, and he was unsparing in his criticism of the Clinton administrationās inaction: āWe have turned our backs on aggression,ā he said. āWe have turned our backs on atrocity. We have turned our backs on conscience.ā After refusing to support the Gulf War, Biden decided that the United States should march on Baghdad and remove Saddam Hussein from power: He supported the invasion of Iraq a decade later. But despite his grand statements about being on the right side of history after the āliberationā of Afghanistan, his commitment to the Afghan people was fickle. One senior Obama administration official observed that Biden āhad . . . empathy for the people in the Balkans. He even had it for people in Iraq. I never saw it in Afghanistan.ā
Afghans are under no illusions. Once the United States is out of the country, the Taliban will be part of any future government. And despite American fantasies of power-sharing, the group will likely become a dominant part of that governmentāan outcome President Ashraf Ghani and members of the current Afghan government have vowed to resist.
As peace negotiations stall amid the U.S. withdrawalāwhich destroyed the last traces of leverage Washington had in the āpeaceā processāthe Talibanās behavior and rhetoric have become increasingly menacing and triumphalist. Consider this statement from Sirajuddin Haqqani, a high-ranking Taliban official: āNo mujahid ever thought that one day we would face such an improved state, or that we will crush the arrogance of the rebellious emperors, and force them to admit their defeat at our hands.ā This isnāt the attitude of leaders preparing to work toward an orderly process of political reintegration. Itās the attitude of conquering warlords.
Thatās exactly what the leaders of the Taliban are. They know it, the Afghan government knows it, the Afghan people know it, and Washington knows it. Why would the Taliban make concessions now, when victory after two decades of grinding warfare is so near at hand? The Afghan security forces are incapable of capturing and holding large tracts of territory even with U.S. and NATO support. NATO has announced that it will withdraw along with the United States, and all the Taliban has to do is wait a few more months. The Taliban shows every indication of attempting to seize as much power as possible after the departure of international forcesāa process that will entail the brutal punishment of many Afghans who will be branded collaborators, and the suppression of those who wish to observe and maintain some semblance of liberal values.
Meanwhile, the current government in Kabul has no intention of submitting to Taliban domination, and militias elsewhere in the country are preparing for protracted fighting, perhaps even civil war. As the New York Times reports: āLongtime power brokers in the countryās west and north have rallied fighters to defend against the Taliban, if necessary,ā also observing that the āTaliban rely on fear to keep local populations in rural areas quiescent. An effective tool is the insurgentsā hidden network of ad hoc underground prisons where torture and punishment are meted out to those suspected of working for, or with, the government.ā This is a glimpse of post-withdrawal Afghanistan. The only difference is the Talibanās power will be institutionalized rather than ad hoc, open rather than secret, and less contained. Parts of Afghanistan will soon revert to the theocratic nightmare that existed before the intervention, while other parts will be violently contested.
When NATO announced that it would withdraw from Afghanistan along with the United States, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the move marked the āstart of a new chapterā in the allianceās relationship with Afghanistan and declared that āAllies and partners will continue to stand with the Afghan people, but it is now for the Afghan people to build a sustainable peace.ā In his speech announcing the full withdrawal of U.S. forces, Biden assured us that the United States would āsupport peace talks between the government of Afghanistan and the Taliban.ā He asked for neighboring countries to ādo more to support Afghanistanā and said itās time to ādetermine what a continued U.S. diplomatic presence in Afghanistan will look like.ā He promised that the U.S. would ācontinue to support the rights of Afghan women and girls by maintaining significant humanitarian and development assistance.ā
But itās no secret that securing these rights is low on Bidenās list of concerns. When Richard Holbrooke, then serving as special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, suggested in 2010 that the United States couldnāt abandon the people of Afghanistan, particularly the women, Biden snapped: āI am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of womenās rights.ā
Despite his avowed humanitarian concern and his empty promises of diplomacy without leverage, Biden doesnāt seem particularly to care what happens in Afghanistan after U.S forces depart. Of course he wants to prevent future terror attacks launched from Afghan soil, but his apparent tolerance for the future suffering of the Afghan peopleāincluding many who worked with the United States and took its promises to help them build a free and democratic society seriouslyāis extremely high. As he put it in his speech last month, he believes itās time to āfight the battles for the next 20 years, not the last 20.ā There will be no ānew chapterā or āsustainable peaceā in Afghanistan. There will only be more bloodshed and repression while the rest of the world watches helplessly.
One of the most suggestive moments of Bidenās speech on Afghanistan was when he insisted that heās bound by a slapdash agreement with the Taliban pieced together by President Trump months before he left the White House. āWhen I came to office,ā Biden said, āI inherited a diplomatic agreement, duly negotiated between the government of the United States and the Taliban, that all U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, just three months after my inauguration. Thatās what we inheritedāthat commitment.ā He continued:
It is perhaps not what I would have negotiated myself, but it was an agreement made by the United States government, and that means something. So, in keeping with that agreement and with our national interests, the United States will begin our final withdrawalābegin it on May 1 of this year.
While many of Bidenās argumentsāabout the cost and length of the war, for instanceāare made in good faith, this one is an exception. Biden clearly doesnāt consider himself bound by a vast range of other agreements made by the U.S. government while Trump was in charge of it (to take just one example, the Biden administration is suspending the Trump-approved sale of offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia), but heās willing to cynically use the agreement on Afghanistan to suggest that he has no choice but to withdraw. Heās echoing the Obama administrationās equally disingenuous assertion that the end of the 2008 status-of-forces agreement with Iraq left him no choice but to withdraw entirely. As if the transparent opportunism of Bidenās statement wasnāt bad enough, he publicly shackled himself to a terrible policy, as Dexter Filkins recently explained in the New Yorker:
Trump was clearly desperate to make a deal that would allow him to say that he had ended the war. When the Taliban refused to include the Afghan government in the talks, the U.S. did not insist. [A] senior American official told me, āThe Trump people were saying, āFuck thisāthe Afghans are never going to make peace anyway. Besides, who cares whether they agree or not?āā As the talks progressed, Trump repeatedly announced troop withdrawals, depriving his negotiators of leverage.
Filkins cited a CBS report which revealed that senior Taliban leaders were fans of Trump. One of them observed that āTrump might be ridiculous for the rest of the world, but he is [a] sane and wise man for the Taliban.ā Itās no surprise that the Taliban was fond of TrumpāFilkins relayed the complaints of an American negotiator that Trump was āsteadily undermining us. The trouble with the Taliban was, they were getting it for free.ā
None of this matters to those who are desperate to see the United States out of Afghanistan at any cost. In an essay celebrating the āfar-sighted, bold, and riskyā decision to withdraw, Peter Beinart praised Biden for his willingness to countenance a āpotential Taliban takeover of Kabul, let alone terrorist attacks from Afghan soil.ā These risks are well worth running in Beinartās mind, but has he considered what will actually happen if a mass casualty terror attack is launched from Afghan soil? Just as the Obama administration was forced to redeploy troops to Iraq when the Islamic State tore through the country a few years after the American exit, Biden may find that the conflicts of the past 20 years canāt be shrugged off so easily. Beinart believes the Biden administration and āDemocratic foreign policy typesā want to āclear the deckā to focus on China, which is exactly what the Obama administration tried to do with its āpivotā to Asia. We know how that turned out. The rest of the world isnāt going to stand down and comfortably squeeze itself into whatever new grand strategy āDemocratic foreign policy typesā want to pursue.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden said he believed the United States should maintain a residual force of āseveral thousand people [in Afghanistan] to make sure that we have a place from which we can operate, if in fact, you find that thereās a re-amassing . . . of al-Qaeda and or ISIS capacity to strike the United States.ā While Biden has long been wary of expanding the United Statesās mission in Afghanistan, itās clear that heās also aware of the immense danger of a complete withdrawal. Now that he has reversed his position on keeping a modest contingent of U.S. forces in Afghanistanāhardly the sort of commitment that would have kept the United States from addressing the threat posed by China, by the wayāitās worth asking why. As Beinart notes, one possible answer isnāt edifying.
Beyond Bidenās desire to reorient the United Statesās focus on China, Beinart believes the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan is the result of a simple political calculation: āIt wasnāt just that Trump had already promised to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan,ā he wrote, echoing Bidenās attempt to present the withdrawal as somehow inevitable. Beinart argues that Trump āshowed Democrats like Biden that the old conventional wisdom about ālosingā wars may no longer hold. Unless Afghanistan incubates another major attack on the U.S., most ordinary Republicansāas well as most Democratsāwonāt blame Biden for leaving it to its fate.ā In other words, it doesnāt matter how horrible things get for the civil society we helped to build or the friends we promised to protect in AfghanistanāBiden doesnāt believe heāll pay a political price for letting the country collapse. This isnāt just a risky bet. Itās an ugly one.
