Americans might have welcomed withdrawal from the country, but the bloody debacle of the pullout left public hostility toward the administration in its wake.
If the Biden White House thought it had emerged from the scandalizing sacrifice of American service personnel and national prestige in Afghanistan largely unscathed, it should think again.
America’s disastrous withdrawal from Central Asia may be little more than a memory today, but the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR), John Sopko, still has his hands full. Speaking to a House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday, Sopko accused the Biden administration of being evasive amid his efforts to secure records about where American aid to Afghanistan is going now that the Taliban is in charge. The “abject refusal” of some executive agencies to allow him to conduct oversight of American aid dollars has led him to some unsavory conclusions, per the New York Times:
“I cannot assure this committee or the American taxpayer we are not currently funding the Taliban. . . . Nor can I assure you the Taliban are not diverting the money we are sending from the intended recipients.”
He ticked off ways in which Taliban fighters were “siphoning off” goods and funds entering Afghanistan, such as by diverting food assistance and by forcing groups to pay fees to operate in the country.
Sopko heaped scorn on the “radio silence” from the Biden administration following SIGAR’s overtures to access records on how $8 billion in post-evacuation Afghan aid is being spent. And even some of the Biden administration’s Democratic allies in Congress are sounding the alarm. “This issue of not enough accountability,” said Maryland representative Kweisi Mfume. “I don’t know how any of us can defend that.”
In August 2021, the Atlantic’s Peter Nicholas articulated the Biden administration’s strategy to evade accountability for the most significant American humiliation abroad since the fall of Saigon. “Memories being short,” he wrote, “voters may eventually forget the tumult at the Kabul airport.” What’s more, “Biden might get political credit for ending American involvement in an unpopular war, as people in his orbit predict.”
That might have been a reasonable, albeit optimistic, prediction if the bloody debacle over which the administration presided in the summer of 2021 was the last Americans heard of Afghanistan. But in fact it was a foolish one — particularly given the assessments by current and former intelligence officials that transnational Islamist terrorism would once again find a willing host in the Taliban.
In the interim, however, we’ve learned the extent to which President Biden overruled his military commanders who hoped to see an enduring American footprint in the country. Or, at the very least, preserve the U.S. presence at Bagram Airbase in anticipation of the need to exfiltrate large numbers of U.S. service personnel, U.S. citizens, and America’s Afghan allies.
We’ve learned that the administration’s laughably static estimates that roughly 100 or so Americans were left behind when Americans fled the country was a flat-out lie. Approximately 10,000–15,000 Americans were in Afghanistan when Kabul fell to the Taliban, and only 6,000 of those Americans were evacuated along with the U.S. military presence. The rest were left behind, relying primarily on civilian efforts to exfiltrate them from behind enemy lines.
Contrary to the administration and its defenders, we learned that none of this came as a surprise. Or at least it shouldn’t have, given a July 2021 U.S. intelligence estimate predicting that, “should the Taliban seize cities, a cascading collapse could happen rapidly, and the Afghan security forces were at high risk of falling apart,” according to the New York Times.
We learned that President Biden’s commitment to the “basic rights of the Afghan people, especially women and girls,” which would manifest in the administration’s effort to “speak out for women and girls all around the world,” was nonsense. The Taliban’s assurances that women and girls could continue to access education under their restored rule was a ruse. Afghan women are once again relegated to second-class-citizen status. And while women and children starve, Sopko informed U.S. lawmakers that the Taliban’s fighters “seem to be fat, dumb, and happy.”
“The Taliban has committed to prevent terrorist groups from using Afghanistan as a base for external operations that could threaten the United States or our allies, including Al Qaeda and ISIS-K,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken assured lawmakers in 2021. Not so, according to the United Nations Security Council, which alleged last year that terrorist front groups such as Jaish-i-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Tayyiba are operating training camps and producing narcotics for export inside Afghanistan. Tajikistan, one of Afghanistan’s Central Asian neighbors, appears increasingly unnerved by the presence of radical Islamist militants in Afghanistan, including groups such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a group with close links to al-Qaeda.
And now we learn from the U.S. inspector general that American aid dollars may be helping to fund the Taliban’s program of human-rights abuses and the reconstitution of terrorist organizations with the goal of exporting extremist militarism abroad.
The Biden administration was on solid ground when it assumed that the American public didn’t love the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and would be happy for us to wash our hands of the place. But the way the U.S. withdrew from the country ensured that Americans would not be able to confidently turn their backs on this strategic Central Asian nation.
If the Biden administration was surprised by Americans’ hostility toward how we left Afghanistan, wait until it sees how the public reacts when we have to go back.