Foreword
With the Taliban storming across Afghanistan fast and furiously , new political risks are coming into view for Biden, who had hoped to win credit for ending what he has called one of America’s “forever wars”.
In the Vienna negotiations Biden demanded that Iran halt its missile-program but Iran refused to do any such thing. Biden dragged-out the negotiations, perhaps hoping that Iran would finally cave. Iran continued to stand firm.
The inflation tax at the checkout line and gas station is inescapable, as is the two-year crime and murder surge around the nation. The southern border remains open to tides of illegal migrants relocated to American towns and cities even though they are infected with Covid-19.
Meanwhile, the same administration that welcomes those migrants missed its vaccination targets and fumbles its ever-changing positions on whether to mask or not to mask.
The confluence of policy failures, repeated miscommunications and the spread of the stubborn virus is presenting Biden with a real crisis.
It’s difficult to find many Americans who aren’t frustrated with Biden. A solid majority, 55 % - pollsters from ABC News - are pessimistic about the direction of the country in the next 12 months, with only 45% saying they are optimistic.
Background
The drawdown of US forces moved forward despite warnings from various figures - from former Democratic secretary of state Hillary Clinton to Republican senate minority leader Mitch McConnell - that a withdrawal could return Afghanistan to Taliban control.
General McMaster, who served as national security adviser from 2017 to 2018 under former president Donald Trump, said what comes next could be worse than the bloody civil war that ravaged Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996. McMaster feared the US withdrawal could amount to a failure to meet the Responsibility to Protect doctrine signed by UN member states in 2005. The agreement calls on member states to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.
Current situation
Recent US military intelligence has shown the Taliban could take the capital in a mere 90 days.
The Pentagon announced Thursday it will deploy three infantry battalions, or roughly 3,000 troops, to assist with the reduction of American civilians at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and the evacuation of Afghan Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) applicants from the country.
Some of Biden’s fellow Democrats are now expressing particular alarm that the Taliban’s rapid advance is already bringing a return to the attacks on women and other human rights violations familiar from its earlier rule of the country.
There is the likelihood of wholesale massacres of any woman who’s in the workplace in Afghanistan, or any woman who has an education, or allow Taliban to kick all of the girls out of school and go back to, really, the days of cave people in the way they treat women and girls.
The Taliban have won a lot of battlefield victories in recent weeks against the Afghan forces as the United States-led foreign forces are about to complete pull-out from Afghanistan after 20 years.
Biden has accused the Afghan forces of being incapable of defending their own country. But the US finger-pointing at the government and Afghan forces is disingenuous. As a matter of fact the "nation-building" achievements US officials have touted in strengthening the central government and in training a modern army over the past 20 years have been vastly exaggerated.
The US made far too optimistic claims about the Afghan government´s progress in governance, progress in warfighting and in creating effective Afghan security forces. Even after 20 years of US training Afghan forces remain dependent on US support for virtually all operations.
Consequences
David Sedney, a former deputy assistant secretary of defence for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia under former president Barack Obama, put it bluntly: “The lesson here is that nobody should trust the United States, whether it’s Ukraine or Vietnam or Taiwan or any country.” General McMaster said on Thursday that the fallout from the US withdrawal from Afghanistan will be devastating.
Advocates are baffled as to why the Biden administration was so slow to act on evacuations, leading to a last-minute scramble that has already resulted in dozens of Taliban revenge killings and record levels of civilian casualties in the first half of 2021.
Russia has criticised the “hasty withdrawal” of US and allied forces, and increased its troops at the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border. The deteriorating situation is also giving China talking points.
“The US, in disregard of its responsibilities and obligations, hastily withdrew from Afghanistan, leaving a mess and turmoil to the Afghan people and regional countries,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said last month. “This further exposed the hypocritical face of the US under the cover of ‘defending democracy and human rights’.”
Biden's failures in Afghanistan
President Biden's speech, in which he announced that US military mission in Afghanistan would end on August 31, without regard for what happens next, was comprised of many internal contradictions and contortions of fact.
After making the bolder claim that former president George W. Bush made in 2003 when he said that US had prevailed in Iraq, Biden quickly backed away from it. He told a reporter that his wasn’t a “mission accomplished” claim and said that US mission in Afghanistan “hasn’t failed…yet.”
The fact is that, despite the admonition in former President Trump’s 2020 agreement with the Taliban , it hasn’t severed its alliance with al-Qaida. There are no facts to support Biden's claim that Afghanistan won’t soon again become a base from which terrorist attacks by al-Qaida (or other terrorist networks) can be mounted against the US in the future.
Biden repeatedly said that it is up to the Afghan people - the Kabul government of Ashraf Ghani and the Taliban - to decide their own future. Is he ignorant of the involvements of Iran, Pakistan, China, and Russia, each of which has been supplying the Taliban with funding and arms for years? Those nations have substantial (at times competing) roles which will enable them, not the “people of Afghanistan ” to decide that nation’s future.
A group of religious warriors, riding on captured American military vehicles, vanquish a US-trained military, which relinquishes much of its power without a fight. Sound familiar?
That's what happened in Iraq after the US withdrawal of troops from the country at the end of 2011. Within three years, an army of ISIS fighters was only a few miles from the gates of Baghdad and had taken many of the significant cities in Iraq.
It was then-Vice President Joe Biden who had negotiated the Obama administration's drawdown from Iraq. In 2014, after ISIS began ethnic cleansing in Iraq and murdering American journalists and aid workers, then-President Barack Obama reversed that decision and sent additional military support.
Now Biden is presiding over a debacle entirely of his own making in Afghanistan. Just as ISIS had done in Iraq, the Taliban is also attacking prisons across Afghanistan and releasing fighters who are joining the insurgency. Previously Biden had pressured the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners, several of whom simply rejoined their old comrades on the battlefield once they were released. It's hard to recall a more failed and counterproductive diplomatic effort. Maybe British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's attempt to reach a lasting peace agreement with Adolf Hitler in 1938 in Munich on the cusp of World War II?
Biden's failures with Iran
Iran stood firm on refusing to make any preliminary concessions, and insisting that America simply rejoin the JCPOA that America had signed under Obama and then abandoned under Trump. Biden started to negotiate with Iran in Vienna though Iran had refused to change its position on developing missiles. Biden was negotiating though he had said he wouldn’t unless Iran first complied with his (which had been Trump’s) demands. Biden lost. Biden in the Vienna negotiations continued demanding that Iran halt its missile-program. Iran continued refusing to do any such thing. Biden dragged-out the negotiations, perhaps hoping that Iran would finally cave. Iran continued to stand firm. Biden didn't consider that the longer those fake ‘negotiations’ continued, the more embarrassing the results would turn out to be for Biden's total failure of his Iran-policy.
Biden's failures in the US
Much of the media, especially the Times, has treated Biden with kid gloves for the first six months of his presidency. But the protection racket can’t hide what people see with their own eyes.
On the inflation tax, the two-year crime and murder surge, the southern border open to tides of illegal migrants infected with COVID-19 , the ever-changing positions on whether to mask or not to mask, and many other issues, the White House seems either incompetent or impotent. Furthermore, just 68% of Americans have received one shot; under half are fully vaccinated. That’s not good enough.
While each Biden misstep is important in its own right, together they take on greater significance as evidence he is not up to the job. His frailty and mannerisms hardly inspire confidence, and the obvious attempts to hide him from extended questioning fuels more doubts about his fitness.
No president in modern times has talked so frequently about “being in trouble” with his staff if he dares take another question from the press, even though Biden has been far less available for such questions than any of his recent predecessors.
It’s a guarantee that none of this has gone unnoticed by China, Russia and Iran. If they conclude Biden is unable to lead America during an international crisis, they will take advantage of the vacuum.
Considerations
The complete, utter failure of the Afghan national army to defend their country is a blistering indictment of a failed 20-year strategy predicated on the belief that billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars could create an effective democratic central government in a nation that has never had one.
Who is responsible for the colossal U.S. failure in Afghanistan? Over the last 20 years, the U.S. lost 2,500 troops with 20,000 wounded and invested $1 trillion to create an Afghan army, only to see that army crumble and disintegrate as soon as US army departed.
Did the U.S. generals, statesmen, politicians and journalists who went to Afghanistan during these last two decades deceive Americans? Why didn't they say that the Afghan army and regime would likely collapse like a house of cards once the Americans departed?
Meanwhile the Taliban are restoring their previous dominance by creating an Islamic Emirate and making themselves the moral, social and political arbiters of a purely Islamic Afghanistan.
They want to say to the Muslim world: “We have shown you how we fought America, the world superpower, for 20 years until we forced the Americans, tails between their legs, to get out of our land.” The Taliban’s God is Allah. The Western golden calf is democracy. In the Hindu Kush, their god has proven stronger.
Even hawks who criticized President Joe Biden's decision to pull all troops from America's longest war have been shocked at the speed at which the Taliban is snapping up territory.
Is this a repeat of the Saigon images of the chaotic April 1975 evacuation of the American Embassy in South Vietnam’s capital with desperate Vietnamese clung to the struts of departing helicopters as the city was being conquered by Communist forces? Is this a repeat of the way Iraq did in 2013 and 2014 when the Islamic State stormed across that country after US troops withdrew? President Barack Obama reluctantly sent troops back to Iraq after the Islamic State began to capture and execute American hostages.
Officials in the Biden administration have repeatedly expressed hope that negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government might produce a peaceful resolution short of a Kabul-based Taliban emirate, but prospects for successful talks are swiftly fading.
Taliban takeover followed by a return to the country of al-Qaeda would be a huge liability for Biden.
Conclusion
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called out the Biden administration for what he described as poor planning and poor execution of a U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Pompeo, who helped plan and execute the early days of the shift toward withdrawing troops from the country after 20 years there, told he and President Donald Trump made sure there were multiple, enforceable "models of deterrence" that would prevent the potential disaster that may await the current White House.
"It looks like they have not been able to execute this," he said. "Strategy depends on planning and execution. Looks like there’s a bit of panic. I hope that they have the right number of folks and get them there quickly. I hope we can protect Americans in the way the Trump administration had every intention of doing."
For the global jihadist movement, the victory of the Taliban will be as significant as ISIS victories were in Iraq and Syria. Just as they did after those ISIS victories, many thousands of foreign fighters are likely to pour into Afghanistan to join the victorious "holy warriors" and receive military training.
There they will join the 10,000 foreign fighters that are already based in Afghanistan from 20 foreign jihadist groups, including al-Qaeda and ISIS.
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