A Strategic Failure

The scenes from Afghanistan over the past week have been harrowing. As the Biden Administration quickly approached their expedited deadline to withdraw the final U.S. troops from the country, Taliban forces took over regional capitals and major cities as regular Afghan soldiers fled their posts or surrendered. On Sunday the Taliban overtook Kabul, the capital, as former President Ashraf Ghani fled the country and handed over power. While this collapse is a disaster, we must remember why the U.S. military was there and understand why the Biden Administration's withdrawal plan failed so we can better protect Americans and our allies going forward.

The U.S. military presence in Afghanistan dates back to the start of Operation Enduring Freedom in October 2001, when U.S. forces allied with NATO and Afghanistan's Northern Alliance in an effort to defeat al-Qaeda, capture Osama Bin Laden, and unseat the Taliban government who gave terrorists safe haven following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Unlike Soviet efforts to expand their worldview and influence in the 1980's, our goal was to help Afghans rebuild their economy while building a self-sufficient representative democracy which protected the human rights of all Afghans. The crowds of Afghans at the Kabul airport, desperate to flee the Taliban, show us just how much many Afghans still want this freedom and opportunity.

In order to achieve these goals, the U.S. and our allies have invested tens of billions of dollars in rebuilding Afghanistan's infrastructure, protecting its people from insurgent attacks, and helping stand up an army of Afghan volunteers to protect the country from the Taliban insurgency. We made this investment because the goal of every President since 9/11 – Bush, Obama, Trump, and now Biden – has been an Afghanistan which is not reliant on United States forces for internal protection. However, while each of the three previous presidents have taken steps to draw down U.S. forces in Afghanistan, none oversaw broad intelligence failures or demonstrated callousness toward our Afghan friends the way President Biden has.

The swift collapse of Afghanistan's republic is an outright strategic and intelligence failure by President Biden. On August 11, after Taliban insurgents had already begun capturing outlying provinces, administration officials said it would take at least 30 days for the Taliban to reach Kabul and at least 90 days for them to overwhelm the city. While the success of the Taliban in outlying provinces alone should have been enough for the Biden Administration to rethink its withdrawal strategy, to miscalculate this badly while continuing to walk away is unacceptable. Even worse, the President's ongoing response, blaming Afghans and failing to use the full force of the U.S. military to ensure the safety of Americans and our Afghans friends as they attempt to leave, only compounds the problem. This sudden abdication also hands over to the Taliban billions of dollars in U.S. military technology.

While President Biden continues to show no interest in Afghanistan in the long term, it is vital we protect American interests moving forward. President Biden must put every available resource into extracting Americans and Afghans who are endangered because they supported our mission to bring peace and freedom to Afghanistan. Countries such as France are reportedly deploying special forces to individually extract and protect citizens as they seek flights out of the country. We must do the same, rather than telling Americans to make their way to save havens at their own risk.

We must also ensure Afghanistan does not resume its status as a sanctuary for terrorists. President Clinton carried out air strikes against al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan in 1998 following the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings, and we must be willing to do the same again. We must use every available resource to hold the Taliban accountable on issues like women's rights, religious freedom, and cultural protection. If we do not ensure Taliban-governed Afghanistan is a pariah state, they will fall further into the orbit of China, Iran, or other would-be powers as a base for attacking the U.S. and other democracies. We have worked too hard and spent too much over the last twenty years to allow this to happen.