Commentary
President Joe Biden’s administration didn’t deliver a report on the Afghan pullout debacle. It produced a propaganda document for its Democratic Party base aimed at shifting blame.
Harry Truman famously said, “The buck stops here,” when it came to his role as president. In Biden’s case, he said that the buck never got here. Accepting responsibility is beyond Biden’s capability.
He wants the misery that Afghan women face due to his decisions to go down the memory hole. The same goes for Afghanistan becoming a base of operations for America’s enemies.
Talking points might be great for CNN pundits or Democratic Party activists, but they don’t reassure the world or the thousands of Afghans who were left behind after the pullout. It also does nothing to counter Russia’s bid to become the key sponsor of the anti-Taliban resistance nor to upend China and Iran’s filling of the void left behind by the American and NATO pullout.
“The drawdown is proceeding in a secure and orderly way, prioritizing the safety of our troops as they depart,” Biden said in his
July 8, 2021, speech announcing the pullout. “I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more competent in terms of conducting war.
Biden continued: “The Taliban is not the North Vietnamese army. 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 .... It is not at all comparable.”
Yet that’s exactly what happened due to his leadership a month later.
The chaotic withdrawal
left 13 Marines dead after an ISIS suicide bomber detonated himself at the Abbey Gate in Kabul. Testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last month revealed unclear rules of engagement that contributed to confusion and prevented Marine Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews from taking out the bomber before he could strike.
“Both myself and my team leader asked for engagement authority, and he responded with he did not have that authority, so we asked who did, and he told us he did not know and would go find out,”
Vargas-Andrews said, noting that he and his fellow Marines had the bomber in their sights and wanted authorization to take him out. “We were told to pass our command if we saw any suspicious activity or hostile intent, and that’s exactly what we did. We were not returned with an answer.”
Blaming President Donald Trump alone for the pullout debacle skirts his responsibilities and role as president. If Joe Biden and his national-security team saw the May 2021 pullout deadline found in the 2020 Doha Agreement as unwise, he could have increased U.S. troop deployments in Afghanistan.
The Biden report is glaring in its omissions and blame-shifting.
“President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor. When President Trump took office in 2017, there were more than 10,000 troops in Afghanistan,” the report said (
pdf). “Over his last 11 months in office, President Trump ordered a series of drawdowns of U.S. troops. By June 2020, President Trump reduced U.S. troops in Afghanistan to 8,600. In September 2020, he directed a further draw down to 4,500.”
The report continued, “During the transition from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration, the outgoing Administration provided no plans for how to conduct the final withdrawal or to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies.”
The dishonesty of this statement is painfully apparent. Former Pentagon Chief of Staff Kash Patel countered by
saying the Trump administration had clear withdrawal plans and that the Biden transition team wasn’t interested.
“The Biden administration was too busy ignoring our documented emails and requests for meetings and phone calls. That’s up to them. But we still put it in the record and transferred it to them,” Patel
told Fox News last week.
Afghan opposition leaders say they consider the Biden report dishonest and disingenuous.
Biden didn’t waste time reversing Trump’s policies toward Russia or the U.S.–Mexican border. He chose to let Afghanistan fall apart. The Afghan allied forces’ morale had been weakened by the Trump administration’s signing of the Doha Agreement that led to the pullout. The Biden administration’s decision to pull logistical support and air cover for the Afghan military pushed Afghanistan’s government into a terminal direction, the recent report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) (
pdf) said.
The Biden report
claimed that the Afghan military had 300,000 troops in contrast with 80,000 for the Taliban. It also cited Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley’s false claim that there was not any indication the Afghan National Self Defense Force (ANSDF) would fail to defend Kabul or that the government would hold.
“Chairman Milley testified on September 28, 2021, that ‘[even during that time, there was] no intel assessment that says the government’s going to collapse and the military’s going to collapse in 11 days … [At that time, the assessments] are still talking weeks, perhaps months,’” the Biden report
said, claiming that no intelligence existed saying the government would fall apart and the Afghan military would fail.
A New York Times
report on Aug. 15, 2021, affirmed that the intelligence in the weeks and months leading to the pullout predicted that “a cascading collapse could happen rapidly and the Afghan security forces were at high risk of falling apart.”
The White House should have consulted CENTCOM commanding Gen. Kenneth McKenzie. He told Pakistani officials in February 2021 that a premature pullout from Afghanistan could result in the collapse of the Afghan government (
pdf).
Biden bears responsibility for pulling the logistical support, intelligence, and air cover that the Afghan military relied on. He and no one else had responsibility for that move. The Afghan military had been designed by the United States to operate essentially as a division of the U.S. Army.
The Biden report completely omits to mention this factor, which was a central theme in the SIGAR report.
“The U.S. approach to reconstructing the ANDSF lacked the political will to dedicate the time and resources necessary to reconstruct an entire security sector in a war-torn and impoverished country,” the SIGAR report said. “As a result, the United States created an ANDSF that could not operate independently and set unrealistic milestones for ANDSF capability development. The eventual collapse of the ANDSF was predictable. ...
“Low troop morale, something the U.S. military did not take into account, was one of the main contributors to the ANDSF’s collapse. However, nothing affected morale more than the realization in February 2021 that U.S. military forces were leaving.”
There is more than enough blame to go around for the Taliban regaining control of Afghanistan, gaining billions of dollars’ worth of American equipment, and for the country returning to being a terrorist base. However, using the report to shift blame and to say that former President Donald Trump was completely responsible is foolish and ignorant. Lies from this administration have undermined America’s standing in the world and the respect it held.
The damage to American credibility will be deep and long-lasting.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
