Our government has obscured the essential counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan, leaving the public misinformed and confused for two decades.
Biden has unwittingly prolonged our ‘forever war.’
F or our military, it was the bloodiest day in the last decade of war in Afghanistan. The 13 deaths suffered on Thursday — ten Marines, two soldiers, one Navy corpsman, all killed in a jihadist mass-murder attack that also claimed dozens of Afghan lives — marked the worst day of combat for our armed forces in the seven years since the Obama/Biden administration announced that combat was over.
Yes, as far as the United States was concerned, the Afghan war was said to be over years before President Trump and then President Biden scorned the remaining counterterrorism mission as a “forever war” that had to be “ended.” How galling that, with Biden supposedly “ending 20 years of war,” we now have more combat casualties than we had when the mission was supposed to be combat.
Of course, even then the government was not clear on what exactly the mission in Afghanistan was. It never has been.
In addressing the nation after Thursday’s atrocity, Biden tried to explain and defend one inexplicable, indefensible thing after another — the Bagram bug-out, the trusting of our Taliban enemies with the security of our people, the sharing of intelligence with the Taliban, the provision to the Taliban of lists identifying Americans and our Afghan collaborators. In his habitual way, Biden’s mien was somber, almost teary, as he claimed to take full responsibility for the derelictions that led inexorably to the calamity; then, of course, he proceeded to insist that there were no derelictions — or, if there were, to blame them on his predecessor, or on U.S. military commanders.
Biden’s blame-shifting to Trump is the same stale tale he has been peddling for weeks. The president, who has modeled himself as the anti-Trump, who has self-consciously reversed every Trump policy under the sun — including successful immigration and foreign policies whose benefits a savvier successor could have played to his advantage — would now have you believe the shameful 2020 pact with the Taliban is the one and only Trump policy he had no choice but to execute.
This is not just false in principle; it is a proven lie in practice. Biden did, in fact, change Trump’s policy, extending the pullout date by over four months. Even if unratified agreements with terrorist organizations that the U.S. doesn’t recognize as governments were enforceable, and even if the Taliban had not been in serial violation of the agreement, Biden’s own actions demonstrate that the U.S. withdrawal is Biden policy.
Since January 20, Biden has been calling the shots. And Biden was hell-bent on getting out, regardless of the risks to current and long-term national security.
Now that this has blown up on him, on the whole country, and especially on the brave Americans whose place in harm’s way our reckless president turned into a death trap, Biden has taken to dissembling about the mission. When it comes to Afghanistan, that’s become a White House tradition.
When our forces invaded the “graveyard of empires” in 2001, it was in righteous post-9/11 fury, with President Bush’s blunt admonition that all governments had to choose whether they were “with us or with the terrorists.” Even in that moment of national unity, though, there was no consensus on who the enemy was. Congress overwhelming approved combat operations, but its authorization to use military force (AUMF) was vague about whom force was authorized against.
One promiscuous result was that the enemy was labeled as an abstraction, “terrorism.” Even though we were fighting anti-American jihadists, the government obsessively resisted any allusion to Islam, particularly to any acknowledgment that jihad was (and is) a pillar of fundamentalist Islam with undeniable scriptural roots. With no concrete enemy identified, the AUMF became an endlessly elastic license to attack anyone and anything the executive branch assessed as connected to 9/11 — no matter where on earth, no matter how attenuated, and no matter whether a targeted terrorist organization even existed when 9/11 happened.
The vagueness also lent itself to mission creep. Since “terror” was the enemy, successive administrations deemed themselves authorized to counter it by combat, democracy-promotion, population-protection, institution-building, and equipping other countries to fight for us. As time wore on, public support ebbed, then switched to resentment, especially after the war in Iraq went badly, the fighting in Afghanistan got more difficult (long after it seemed that we had won), the nation-building seemed increasingly unrelated to American national security, and the peoples for whom we were sacrificing remained hostile and ungrateful.
The Bush administration had been the clearest in explaining to Americans that we not only had to vanquish al-Qaeda and its state sponsors, but that a counterterrorism mission — denying sanctuary and regime support to jihadists who would otherwise continue attacking us — would require years of vigilance. But especially in Bush’s second term, this message was increasingly drowned out by the delirium of the “freedom agenda,” which conveyed a false sense that our security hinged on democratic reform in fundamentalist Islamic societies.
In the Obama/Biden years, even during the combat phase, which didn’t formally end until 2014, our commanders spoke as if their only purpose was to protect Afghans who were valiantly fighting for a Western-progressive vision of Afghanistan — a vision that was anathema to more Afghan Muslims than our government cared to concede. After ramping up to suppress the jihadist insurrection, Obama formally shifted from a combat mission to counterterrorism, but his rhetoric was about getting out. Yet, chastened by the disaster that ensued after his premature withdrawal from Iraq, and the killing of our ambassador to Libya (along with three other Americans) in the jihadist hotbed of Benghazi, Obama listened to his commanders and maintained a modest but dwindling troop presence in Afghanistan.
Trump’s commanders, too, pressed to continue the counterterrorism mission, but they needed to do it gingerly. Whenever Afghanistan came to the commander in chief’s attention, the mission was derided as a pointless “forever war” that Trump couldn’t get out of fast enough — to the point of signing the Trump–Taliban pact that his own former national security adviser, retired general H. R. McMaster, has described as a “capitulation agreement.” But even Trump, though he snarled that warriors were “acting as a police force, not the fighting force that we are,” stopped short of pulling out.
Then came Biden, who not only echoed the “forever war” rhetoric, but insisted that he would be the president to end this supposedly futile and unnecessary exercise. Biden insouciantly shrugged off the national-security perils that had brushed Obama and Trump back from their withdrawal stances.
Suffice it to say that the American people have never had from their government a clear-eyed understanding of the mission in Afghanistan, and why it continued year after frustrating year.
Incoherence about the enemy and the mission was maximal when it came to the Taliban. Like President Clinton before him, President Bush never formally recognized the Taliban as Afghanistan’s government but treated them as the de facto regime — even pleading with them, post-9/11, to surrender al-Qaeda leaders for prosecution. Naturally, they were never going to do that, but the “War on Terror” might not have happened had they complied.
Early on, after being spurned, Bush regarded the Taliban as our terrorist enemies. Our forces imprisoned Taliban operatives as enemy combatants under the laws of war, and the Bush Treasury Department labeled them as terror facilitators. But the Bush State Department never did — hoping, as every succeeding administration did, to negotiate with them.
The Obama/Biden administration raised the stakes on this approach: helping the Taliban — as the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” — establish a formal diplomatic presence in Doha, Qatar. From there, the State Department negotiated with the Taliban as if they were the potential regime-in-waiting, even surrendering five of their commanders whom we’d been detaining as terrorist enemy combatants.
Still worse, Trump not only struck the written agreement with the Taliban. To get them to sign, he leaned on Pakistan to release their leader, then leaned on the Afghan government to free 5,000 prisoners whose release the Taliban demanded — precisely because they wanted jihadist reinforcements for the military campaign they were waging to oust the U.S.-backed regime in Kabul.
But not even this recklessness could match that of the current administration.
Biden ordered a complete withdrawal, regardless of conditions on the ground. Even more than Trump, he undermined the U.S.-backed government — its 300,000-strong armed forces that we needed as a multiplier to project U.S. force — by sabotaging its capacity to operate. Simultaneously, and in characteristic Biden incongruity, he touted this Afghan military he had doomed as the reason the U.S. could abruptly pull out — they were going to hold off the Taliban enemy. When the Afghan forces inevitably collapsed, Biden predictably said the Taliban accession he’d assured us was unlikely was actually unavoidable. In the blink of an eye, the Taliban went from a sinister cabal Biden did not trust to a security partner he trusted to help us evacuate — because of the president’s expert (ahem) assessment of their “interests.”
Don’t bother watching what the Taliban do; don’t worry your pretty little head about what the Taliban believe and how they loathe the United States. Just rely on ol’ Joe’s measure of what’s good for the Taliban. After all, it’s not like Biden doesn’t reverse himself every ten minutes, when his handlers aren’t reversing for him.
On nothing has Biden been his ineptly cynical self quite like “the mission.” To be sure, the government has obscured the essential counterterrorism mission, leaving the public misinformed and confused for two decades. But Biden has taken dissembling to new heights.
As I’ve noted a couple of times, among the most irresponsible things Biden has done is the early July abandoning of Bagram Air Base, the U.S. operations headquarters for nearly 20 years — one that is vital for the counterterrorism mission of denying jihadists regime-backed safe haven. Now that things have gone horribly wrong, now that it is apparent that a withdrawal centered on Bagram rather than the Kabul airport would have made far more sense, Biden is blaming his commanders.
As our Mark Wright relates (with embedded video of the president’s Thursday press conference), Biden said that before surrendering Bagram, he asked U.S. military strategists, “What would be the most efficient way to accomplish the mission?” But Biden does not describe the mission he was talking about. It was not counterterrorism. It was not waging war. It was not holding off the Taliban or quelling al-Qaeda. The mission was Biden’s political decision to completely withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan — with no plausible plan for accomplishing any American national-security objective.
Moreover, as Mark elaborates, the president did not let on that, to carry out the withdrawal on Biden’s politically determined deadline (designed, as the Wall Street Journal’s Bill McGurn explains, so Biden could deliver a self-congratulatory “I ended the war” speech on the 20th anniversary of 9/11), the commanders were being compelled to carry out “the mission” under artificial caps. The in-country troop level was to be kept under 700 — even as low as 600.
Biden does not describe “the mission” because the mission he had in mind was surrender to the Taliban — our swift departure at their demand. On that theory, surrendering Bagram makes sense; it’s completely consistent with the objective, even if it makes zero security sense.
The catastrophe, alas, is deeper than Thursday’s casualties and heartache. As we argued in an editorial this week, the counterterrorism mission does not go away just because the public wearies of troop deployments — even modest ones — if they are demagogued enough. It does not go away because a president, heedless of our defense needs, botches a withdrawal with deadly consequence.
Modern history instructs that when virulently anti-American sharia-supremacists take control of a government, its territory becomes a platform for jihadist mass-murder attacks targeting Americans. The Taliban have been running Afghanistan for only a few days, and it has already happened. And that’s when a few of our troops are still there, and the jihadist groups with long-standing ties to the Taliban have not yet fully spread their wings.
President Biden will have his heedless withdrawal. But far from ending the war, he has galvanized our enemies. That’s how you extend a forever war.