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Why President Biden changed his mind on Afghanistan
Read more on - Polity | Economy | Schemes | S&T | Environment
- A changed mind: After 9/11, Joe Biden embraced the idea that U.S. troops should leave the country better than how they found it. Now, as president, he’s withdrawing them regardless. In November 2001, Biden, then-chairperson of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was sitting in the Oval Office listening to Bush talk enthusiastically about an idea he had once denigrated: nation-building.
- The story of 2001: The Taliban were on the run, hammered relentlessly by U.S. bombs, and the brief war known as “Operation Enduring Freedom” was all but won after only a month. The subject of discussion was what would happen to Afghanistan afterward. Biden had nodded approvingly as Bush insisted this wasn’t going to be like 1989, when the US discarded the country like a used cartridge after years of supplying the mujahedeen in their successful war against the Soviets, opening the way to Taliban rule. So now, Biden agreed to a costly plan, using a multi-national force, to rebuild Afghanistan.
- Swift turn by Bush: Sadly, Bush took a swift turn toward Iraq and neglected Afghanistan. Biden was by then emotionally invested in Afghanistan, and in January 2002, became the first U.S. member of Congress to visit Kabul. He was taken to a new girls’ school, an experience that moved him immensely since such schools had been banned under Taliban rule. In the early 2000s, Biden tried to persuade then-U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to do more to bring Afghanistan into the modern world. But Rumsfeld insisted on a “small footprint” and occasional counterterrorism strikes from the air.
- Taliban's return: As Washington turned its attention to Iraq, the Taliban crept back from the mountains and formed the Quetta Shura, the Taliban leaders’ council across the border in Pakistan.
- By 2004, when the Taliban insurgency began again in earnest, the United States was entirely consumed with its own insurgency in Iraq.
- Today, things are completely out of hand. Funded by opium sales and the Pakistani intelligence service, the resurgent Taliban are believed to exert influence or control over at least half the country.
- They are able to strike freely even in the Afghan capital, Kabul, especially since the militant group has deeply infiltrated the demoralized Afghan national security forces.
- Biden in 2021: He has adopted a very different point of view, and announced that all U.S. forces would withdraw by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. NATO immediately followed Biden’s lead, saying its roughly 7,000 non-U.S. forces in Afghanistan would be departing within a few months.
- “I’m now the fourth United States president to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan; two Republicans, two Democrats. I will not pass this responsibility onto a fifth,” Biden said. “Our diplomatic and humanitarian work will continue,” he added.
- No one has any illusions about what is certain to be at least a partial return of Taliban power, even though Biden sent U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Afghanistan to pledge the United States’ “ongoing commitment” to the elected Afghan government.
- Women will be crushed: The first to suffer could well be girls and women, who the Taliban, in their past incarnation in power from 1996 to 2001, kept out of school and public sight. Women were also forced to wear burqas, an all-encompassing garment that hides even their faces. American experts now fear a premature declaration of success and a too-rapid withdrawal could open Biden to the same criticisms that former U.S. President Barack Obama suffered when he pulled out of Iraq in 2011 (on Biden’s advice), only to see the Islamic State fill the vacuum. Some fear that Biden’s decision could potentially leave the US in a place similar to where it was pre-9/11: facing a Taliban-dominated host nation for al Qaeda.
- Things as they stand: The Afghan peace talks are now doomed, and the Taliban have no incentive whatsoever to negotiate anything. Turkey has announced that representatives of both the Afghan government and the Taliban would continue talks in Istanbul in April 2021, but the Taliban may not be interested. Maybe Biden will look back and regret he made that decision. So what changed for Biden? By several accounts, he is at the tail end of a long period of deepening disillusionment with Afghanistan, a process that started with the Afghan leader that Washington installed in the early 2000s, Hamid Karzai.
- Over time, Biden came to believe that because of endemic corruption, the United States was throwing billions of dollars—and nearly 2,500 U.S. lives lost along with more than 20,000 wounded—into a nation that was irremediably backward and broken, ruled by medieval warlords and fundamentalist sensibilities.
- The war has cost $2.26 trillion in all since the United States invaded on Oct. 7, 2001. Experts estimate that “waste, fraud, and abuse” has cost the United States at least $19 billion in reconstruction money.
- In February 2008, Biden traveled again to Afghanistan along with his close Senate colleagues John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, and they were invited to dinner with President Karzai at his palace. The three heavyweights wanted to address the corruption in Karzai’s government, including runaway graft and alleged narcotics connections. After Karzai denied such problems existed, an enraged Biden threw down his napkin, slammed the table with his hand, and walked out, declaring, “This dinner is over.”
- Later, Biden became the lone senior official to argue early in the Obama administration that another troop “surge” would be a waste. As Obama wrote in his recent memoir, A Promised Land, Biden expressed little faith in the Afghan government’s reliability under Karzai and later, current President Ashraf Ghani.
- Endgame: Once he became president, Biden swiftly signaled his intentions when he kept on former U.S. President Donald Trump’s envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad. In 2020, Khalilzad negotiated a controversial agreement with the Taliban: U.S. troops would leave by May 1 in exchange for the Taliban’s commitment to disavow al Qaeda and enter into peace talks with an Afghan delegation. The Taliban have largely failed to follow through on these promises, though Biden says the U.S. withdrawal will begin on May 1 anyway.
- Summary: Biden’s announcement could also accelerate the end of “forever wars” against other terrorist groups around the world like the Islamic State if they are no longer deemed to pose a strategic threat to the United States. The president has now cited the rise of new challenges such as China and global health, saying, “We’ll be much more formidable to our adversaries and competitors over the long term if we fight the battles for the next 20 years, not the last 20.” Biden lost his son Beau, who served in the Iraq war. “War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multigenerational undertaking,” he said. “We were attacked. We went to war with clear goals. We achieved those objectives. Bin Laden is dead and al Qaeda is degraded in Afghanistan. And it’s time to end the forever war.”
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