OPINION:
The fiasco unfolding in Afghanistan is one of the gravest foreign policy disasters in decades. Even the savviest political spin can’t spare President Joe Biden this tragic truth: It all falls on his frail shoulders.
By now, the entire world has seen the shocking video coming out of Kabul, the Afghan capital, which the Taliban seized last weekend while officially conquering Afghanistan. As Taliban fighters took over the presidential palace, helicopters rushed to evacuate American diplomats from the US embassy. Friends and enemies alike witnessed America’s humiliation on the global stage. Meanwhile, the internet and airwaves were flooded with scenes of people holding onto American planes taking off, in some cases tragically falling to their deaths, in a desperate bid to escape the Taliban’s grasp.
Veterans like myself watched this chaos in utter disbelief. American soldiers had fought and died for 20 years to prevent the Taliban from taking over. I know some of them. Mr. Biden wasted all their sacrifices in a matter of weeks by withdrawing in an incompetent and utterly shameful manner, as I discussed this week on my podcast. How did we get here?
“American leadership means ending the forever war in Afghanistan,” Mr. Biden said in April. “The war in Afghanistan … was never meant to be multi-generational undertakings of nation-building.”
Yes, Mr. Biden, like President Trump before him, is right for wanting to get America out of endless foreign wars. But the steps Mr. Biden took were hardly as measured or well thought out as was required.
For example, the U.S. had trained the Afghan military to call in American air support to conduct airstrikes, gather the wounded, and resupply the Afghans. Our Afghan allies could not fight without this air support and US intelligence. Yet Mr. Biden pulled America’s air support and intelligence for the Afghan military effectively overnight. He even prevented private contractors from entering Afghanistan to service Afghan aircraft.
It’s one thing to make this a gradual process over time but pulling the plug in one fell swoop was just irresponsible. Even worse, thousands of Americans remain trapped in Afghanistan, where the Taliban is preparing to impose its barbaric form of Islamic law across the country. The Biden administration appears to have been completely unprepared for this scenario and, as a result, has sent thousands of U.S. troops back to Afghanistan to help evacuate Americans and allied personnel.
Just last month, Mr. Biden rejected the prospect of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. “The likelihood there is going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely,” he told reporters, adding that the Afghan army is an effective fighting force and that the Afghan government “clearly has the capacity” to remain in place. And then Biden infamously promised, “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.”
Five weeks later, literally, everything Mr. Biden said turned out to be wrong. The Biden administration was either woefully unprepared, or Mr. Biden was lying last month. There is no other explanation.
Naturally, the administration and its leftist cohorts are trying to pin this disaster on President Trump. In a statement last weekend, Mr. Biden deflected all blame, claiming, “I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor … that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001.”
Mr. Biden then provided a false choice: Either follow through on the deal, “with a brief extension to get our forces and our allies’ forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict.” In other words, Biden is trying to twist the situation to say it was either his policy or an all-out war — similar to his and Barack Obama’s defense of the Iran nuclear deal.
This is cowardly, feckless, and simply false. The American people see right through this straw-man argument. Of course, this shouldn’t be surprising. Every disaster during this administration — from the border crisis to inflation, and now Afghanistan — is blamed on the previous administration. Most people across the political spectrum — Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives — recognize that the Biden administration has caused a debacle in Afghanistan, which will now become a haven for terrorists as it was before 9/11.
The country will also devolve back into hell on earth, with the Taliban not only oppressing women and brutalizing the population but also slaughtering gays. As a Taliban judge told the German newspaper Bild last month, “There are only two penalties for gays: either stoning or he has to stand behind a wall that falls on him. The wall must be 2.5 to 3 meters high.” Remember when Mr. Biden and his chief diplomat, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, promised to put human rights at the center of US foreign policy? Yeah, I do, too. Someone should tell them that if their policies create more pain and suffering worldwide, their words mean nothing.
• Rob Smith is an Iraq War veteran, author of ‘Always a Soldier,’ and host of the podcast, Rob Smith Is Problematic.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.