With the Taliban back in power, he’s not telling the nation what our mission is now.
With the Taliban back in power, he’s not telling the nation what our mission is now.
L istening to President Biden on Monday rationalize the mess he has made of Afghanistan has to be extraordinarily frustrating for people who do not closely follow politics and policy — the bad history, the goalpost-shifting, and the delusional assessments of where things stand.
To hear Biden tell it, the stark alternative he inherited upon assuming office was either to follow through with former president Donald Trump’s terrible deal with the Taliban (and he’s right that it really was terrible) or to “escalate” into a hot war with the Taliban, as a proxy for the weak-willed Afghans who would neither fight for themselves nor negotiate with those jihadists.
This is straight from the most dog-eared page of the Obama-Biden playbook: Blame the predecessor for the supposed no-win choice of a bad agreement or an all-out, politically unpopular war, as if there were no middle ground and presidents had no agency. It’s how we got the abominable Iran nuclear deal.
The bumbling Biden’s account is false — self-evidently so. As he concedes, he extended Trump’s May 1 withdrawal deadline by more than four months. Even Biden must grasp that, as commander in chief carrying out a nonbinding agreement with the Taliban, a foreign terrorist organization that was in rampant violation of the agreement’s terms, he not only had it in his power to refuse to honor Trump’s deal; he did refuse to honor it by changing the deadline. (For more on this, see Charlie Cooke’s stellar column.)
Moreover, since taking office, Biden has not deemed himself bound by a single thing done by Trump. He ran as the anti-Trump, and he has governed accordingly — for example, gratuitously making a security disaster out of the southern border that Trump did a decent job of enforcing. The president could have ignored his predecessor’s Taliban deal entirely.
Instead, Biden is doing the Obama Iraq shuffle. Recall that President Obama, too, set about undoing his predecessor’s every move, except for President Bush’s unratified, unenforceable status-of-forces agreement with the detestable Maliki regime in Baghdad, which had a premature withdrawal date that Obama pretended tied his hands. Obama did that because he was determined to vacate Iraq, no matter the consequences. So, too, Biden was as hellbent as Trump to vacate Afghanistan, no matter the consequences.
One War on Terror, Two Different Conflicts
There the analogy breaks down, though. Iraq and Afghanistan are regarded as two parts of the same so-called War on Terror, but they have been very different conflicts.
I’ve acknowledged that Iraq, a war of choice that empowered Iran and devolved into a delusional sharia-democracy experiment, was a mistake that I regret supporting — and I’ve been adamant over the years that we learn from it rather than repeat the mistake (as Obama did, with Republican urging) in Libya and Syria. The GOP canard that Obama “created” ISIS is no better than the Left’s smear that there were no jihadists in Iraq until Bush drew them there.
In stark contrast, Afghanistan was never a war of choice. Regrettably, it, too, devolved into a misadventure in sharia-democracy nation-building. That has long obscured the stubborn fact that we dispatched forces there because we were attacked. The war in Afghanistan — from the perspective of national security (always a vital American interest) rather than of hope that Afghans would enjoy a bright future (not a vital American interest) — has always been about (a) crushing the terror network that targeted us, and (b) preventing Afghanistan, long an ungovernable sharia-supremacist dystopia, from allowing anti-American jihadists safe haven to recruit, train, and plot.
This leads us to another of the core misrepresentations in Biden’s speech. Afghanistan, in his telling, is just like any other place in which al-Qaeda and ISIS have sanctuary across the globe — in Syria and across Africa, for example.
If you have a historical perspective that stretches back a bit more than five minutes, you’ll find this remarkable since, during the heady Obama/Biden days, we were told that al-Qaeda had been defeated and ISIS was merely the jayvee team. Now, Biden wants you to know that, far from defeated, these wily terrorists are all over the place, and, since we don’t deploy forces in every country where they have a presence, he says this ubiquity has become a rationale to vacate Afghanistan. (Anyone remember when Democrats used to say that Afghanistan became a mess because Bush took his eye off it to concentrate on Iraq and other countries?)
Why Afghanistan Is Different
Biden’s analysis is specious. Afghanistan is not like every other country where jihadist networks have franchises. It is a special case. The threat to us there is not hypothetical. It is based on concrete history: that of a sharia-supremacist hotbed which is traditionally ungovernable; where a brutal sharia-supremacist regime arose, with a boost from Pakistan, the nefarious neighbor; where that regime forged an enduring alliance with al-Qaeda, the like-minded jihadist network; and from which sprang an ambitious jihad against the United States.
Not just one attack on September 11, 2001. Al-Qaeda declared war on America in the mid-nineties, as soon as the terror network moved back to Afghanistan (from whence it was formed out of the Afghan mujahideen who fought the Soviets with U.S. help in the late eighties). Thereafter, it bombed our embassies in eastern Africa and bombed the USS Cole — there were other plots against American interests worldwide, but those were the successful attacks. Its strikes against our homeland on 9/11 were more lethal than the attack on Pearl Harbor that spurred our entry into World War II.
In his revisionist history, Biden would now have you believe that the threat that makes Afghanistan unique was quelled when our forces routed al-Qaeda in the months after 9/11 (which is a different tune from Biden’s oldie about Obama defeating al-Qaeda by killing Osama bin Laden in 2011 . . . in a military operation that Biden, in his incorrigible denseness, opposed). With that mission accomplished about 18 years ago, Afghanistan supposedly became just like any other country where jihadists nest — a problem, but not one calling for an on-site deployment of U.S. troops.
To the contrary, the challenge in Afghanistan has never been the mere presence of terror cells. It has been the operational partnership between jihadists and a jihadist regime, which resulted in actual mass-murder attacks on the United States. That is why the Afghanistan mission, from the beginning — and before the democracy-promotion delusion — included denying an arrangement in which jihadists had government-assured safe haven.
What Does the Counterterrorism Mission in Afghanistan Require?
If we had grown-ups in the room (real ones, not the ones that Democrats purport to be, as Jim Geraghty details), this would be the place to have the good-faith discussion about our national security, to wit: What does the counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan require? It used to be that the first priority in national defense was to identify the vulnerability, and only then to propose an adequate safeguard. Now, however, in an age when national security is as politicized as everything else, our practice has become to dictate a strategy that is heedless of the vulnerability, pronounce every dissenter a partisan forever-warmonger, and, of course, pivot to “infrastructure.”
But let’s try.
Biden’s assessments are wrong, but he does have a good point that his critics are not addressing.
From the erroneous premise that Afghanistan, now under renewed Taliban rule, is just like any other country with a jihadist-network presence, the president claims that we now have “over the horizon” counterterrorism capability, so we don’t need a significant troop presence. That is absurd, for reasons I’ve previously addressed. As the chessboard currently stands, our air power is thousands of kilometers away. With no military presence, we will lack the intelligence needed to make air power consequential. And with a hostile pro-jihadist regime in place, and with our pullout leaving high and dry thousands of Afghans who cooperated with our armed forces over the years, it would be hard to entice informants even if we had an intelligence hub in or near the country.
Now, what does Biden have right? That his critics are living in a dreamworld when they insist that the counterterrorism mission could be accomplished with just a few thousand soldiers deployed — that because we had no military deaths in well over a year with fewer than 12,000 troops in-country (recently, as few as 3,500), those low-danger, low-resource levels could be sustained indefinitely.
In truth, we got by with modest troop levels — recently reduced to a level that military experts will tell you is not even enough to do force protection, much less counterterrorism operations — because the Taliban understood that we were leaving. They had every incentive not to attack us (lest we changed our minds) and to shift those combat resources to their principal goal of overthrowing the U.S.-backed government in Kabul.
If we were going to keep a troop presence in the country — even when the Taliban were just insurgent jihadists violently opposed to U.S. forces, let alone now when they are the anti-American Islamist government — it was going to require more than 3,500 troops, probably a lot more. It was also going to require what has been lacking from the start: acceptance of the stubborn fact that the Taliban are our enemy, not a cabal of “moderate Islamists” who might come around if we appease them enough. (That strategy sure has worked well with Iran, no?)
At least until he let the Taliban sweep back into power, Biden was wrong that it would have taken all-out war to continue executing an in-country counterterrorism mission. And he is mendacious in obfuscating that vital counterterrorism mission by speaking as if our troops were in the country only to referee an intractable civil war.
Still, this was not going to be a deployment so modest as to be negligible. Yes, we were down to 3,500 troops. In times of hot war over the last 20 years, however, we had as many as 100,000 in-country, and over 50,000 at all times from 2009 into 2013. For reasons we’ll come to, the troop level dropped to under 20,000 in 2014 and had been steadily declining since — until Biden had to send in forces to facilitate what has become a disastrous pullout. We’ve successfully executed the counterterrorism mission with these diminished troop levels; but again, that had a lot to do with the Taliban’s hands-off approach to Americans once they were convinced we were leaving.
The counterterrorism mission is not a luxury. We are not talking about nation-building or protecting the Afghan population. This is essential American national security. But the government needs to be honest with the public about what it would entail in manpower and about why it is necessary to prevent a reprise of Afghanistan circa 1996 through 9/11. And while we’re at it, there should be an explanation to the public of how it is that, since 9/11, we lavished tens of billions of dollars in counterterrorism aid on Pakistan, right next door to Afghanistan, yet Islamabad remains more of a liability than a counterterrorism asset.
The ‘Forever War’ Nonsense
Finally, echoing the “forever war” line of Trump populists, Biden maintains that we were in a 20-year war in Afghanistan that had to come to an end — and the end of which, we are to believe, was going to be just as ugly and humiliating for the United States no matter whether it happened last weekend or a month, a year, or a decade from now.
Let’s put aside that this contradicts what the president said just a month ago. The fact of the matter is that we have not been in a real war in Afghanistan for many years.
As I detailed in 2009, the then-nascent Obama/Biden administration did not consider Afghanistan to be America’s war at all. Political and military officials considered it to be a civil war in which we were trying to help one side win by getting the Afghan public to buy into the legitimacy of the government we were propping up.
The de facto Obama/Biden rejection of Afghanistan as an American war became official policy in 2014, when the administration ended the major combat mission, Operation Enduring Freedom, after 13 years. In its place, Obama/Biden commenced Operation Freedom’s Sentinel. The upshot was to shift completely from a war footing to counterterrorism, in conjunction with training up the Afghan security forces (under the guise of the NATO-led “Resolute Support” mission).
When you think about how much Biden was insulting your intelligence in his Monday remarks, recall the Obama-Biden administration’s insistence that, during its tenure, America must not be seen as at war with Muslim countries. We were to understand that that was outdated Bushie thinking, which had disserved our security by stoking terrorism (which, you see, is caused by American policy, climate change, income inequality, white supremacism — anything but sharia supremacism).
It was thus amusing to hear Biden rail on Monday that nation-building was never supposed to be the mission in Afghanistan. In point of fact, it was the mission the Obama-Biden administration not only embraced in Afghanistan but was anxious to repeat in Libya — even if it took decapitating the regime to do it, with the result that the place has been a trainwreck ever since.
In any event, we have not been at war in Afghanistan for at least seven years. And while every life of our best and bravest is precious, we have in that time barely taken casualties (compared to normal wartime operations). According to the Defense Department, there have been just 94 U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan since 2014, and just 64 in military operations of some kind. The last American military deaths in Afghanistan — two of them — occurred in February 2020, a year and a half ago.
For Biden to suggest on Monday that Afghanistan has added row upon row of tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery was disgraceful demagoguery. In World War II, more than seven times as many Americans were killed in a single training exercise than we have lost in Afghanistan since 2014.
National Security and Prosperity Are Not Free
It is not an accident that we have not experienced a 9/11-level terrorist attack in the U.S. in 20 years. Effective counterterrorism requires denying jihadist networks safe haven and state sponsorship. That is what we have been doing in Afghanistan for the past seven-plus years. Just as our enemies do not disappear because we weary of them, neither does the mission evaporate.
And we have no business wearying of it. Even if we pretend that troop presence by itself equals war, which it never has, Afghanistan does not come close to our other “forever wars.” We have about 28,000 troops in South Korea, where there has been a significant U.S. deployment for 70 years. You may have thought the last century’s most significant conflict ended in 1945, but we’ll apparently have to rebrand it “World Forever War II” since, eight decades later, we still have over 50,000 troops in Japan and over 60,000 in Europe (including over 35,000 in Germany alone).
These deployments enable us to project force and collect intelligence in parts of the world that would be far more dangerous, for us and for everyone else, if our troops weren’t there. American life would not be nearly as secure, free, or prosperous without them.
President Biden’s claim that we can do effective “over the horizon” counterterrorism in Afghanistan is untenable. His conviction that the catastrophe he has made of America’s retreat somehow proves he was right all along is yet another dimwitted demonstration of why his claim to fame is to have been wrong on just about every major issue in his improbable half-century climb to the pinnacle of our politics.
What he, like his predecessor, has deprived the nation of is an honest assessment of what the counterterrorism mission is in Afghanistan and what military resources would be necessary to execute it. With the Taliban installed once again in Kabul, the jihadists back in business, and our government bereft of a plausible plan, we are back in a turn-of-the-century threat environment. Thus are we left to hope, as if hope were a strategy, that this won’t have turn-of-the-century consequences.
PHOTOS: The Fall of Afghanistan