The shelf life of Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s declaration on ABC’s This Week last Sunday that the rapidly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan was “manifestly not Saigon” lasted mere hours. Before dusk that day the Taliban flooded the capital city of Kabul, and Afghan president Ashraf Ghani fled the country as his government collapsed. President Joe Biden sought to cast the ensuing chaos, confusion, and devastation on the ground in Afghanistan as inevitable; these were the predetermined consequences of withdrawal, which the American people wanted. But the administration’s phlegmatic defense that it had “prepared for every contingency” was undercut by images of Afghans clinging to the wings of U.S. aircraft lifting off from the Kabul airport and tragic anecdotes of the America allies and Afghan refugees we’d left behind. The notion that the execution of the withdrawal, not the decision to pursue it, was a mess, quickly became a bipartisan posture. The question perplexing the Beltway was: What exactly was the plan here?
Before Biden pulled thousands of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the Taliban had steadily been working their way across the country, assuming control of a succession of provincial capitals. By the day before Blinken’s “Mission Accomplished” moment, the Afghan military maintained control of just two major cities. The fall of Kabul to the Taliban was foreseen, even if the timing was not. “We certainly need to do a retrospective as a nation—the president on down—as to how potentially some of this transition could have been more seamless,” former New York congressman Max Rose, who served in Afghanistan, told me. “But make no bones about it, this overarching outcome of the Taliban in control of Afghanistan was inevitable. This is how the movie was going to end.”
Despite this certainty, the Biden administration was seemingly caught flat-footed by the surge of Taliban troops in Kabul. A State Department official who works in the region characterized the sentiment within the department as “just trying to keep up” with the rapidly changing dynamics on the ground. A former ambassador described a mad scramble on their part to help evacuate American citizens and U.S. allies trapped in the deteriorating situation. “Could this have been executed better? Yes. Biden presented himself as the ‘return of cool competence’ after the clown show of Trump,” a former ambassador in the region said. “But even though there are good arguments for his decision to withdraw, it’s clear that the way this was done contributed to the chaos. I really suspect there was no plan. And if you’re Biden, sorry, you should have a plan.”
Democrats in both chambers of Congress have announced hearings on the Afghanistan withdrawal. As Congresswoman Barbara Lee, a Biden ally who was the sole member of Congress to vote against a resolution that allowed President George W. Bush to use military force against anyone involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and who has long pushed for withdrawing from Afghanistan, said in an interview this week, she was “really disappointed” with how the withdrawal was handled at the start. While she gave the president credit for owning that the buck stops with him, she said she and her colleagues were poised to “unravel” what went wrong, as “we can never allow this to happen again.”
That the Biden administration didn’t evacuate Afghan allies, refugees, and Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) applicants, many of whom served alongside U.S. troops, has emerged as a leading point of criticism. “For a lot of us who served over there, the focus is more on just the incredible institutional failures,” a former senior defense official said. “The failure of the U.S. military to build cohesive security forces, that’s a 20-year failure. And I think we’ve got to look at that from a policy perspective and figure out what went wrong over a longer period of time. Whereas the failure to effectively process visas to get people out of the country, to conduct any type of coherent withdrawal from the country, that’s a more immediate failing.”
Advocates pushing for the evacuation of U.S. allies remaining in Afghanistan insist that there is still time to get people out of the country, though they iterate that they aren’t all waiting at the gates of the Kabul airport to board a plane but rather are scattered across the country, approved for a visa but stuck in Herat or Kandahar. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t devastated. President Biden’s decision may even be right, but to see it unfold this way, in a way that was completely avoidable, is shameful. It is an embarrassment for our troops, for our diplomats, for our nation,” Congressman Seth Moulton, a former Marine Corps commander who served in Iraq and has been pushing the administration for an evacuation plan for months, told me. “The worst part is knowing some of the innocent lives that are on the line, knowing these American-bound volunteers, Afghan heroes, people who believed in the United States of America and risked everything to serve with us are now at risk of just being left behind. We have a principle in the Marines that you don’t leave anyone behind, but I fear that’s exactly what’s happening right now.
“Innocent people have already been killed, but there are thousands of lives that America can still save,” Moulton added.
Despite the Taliban’s attempts to signal they will play nice, sources I spoke with are under no illusion that the group is now altruistic. “The Taliban clearly are not to be trusted,” a former high-ranking State Department official said bluntly. That is why there is a deep sense of urgency among members of Congress to get people out. “When we talk about our Afghan allies, it is important for the American people to understand who we are talking about: Afghans who risked their lives to assist U.S. troops on the battlefield. Countless American service members who came home safe owe that to our Afghan allies,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who has worked to improve the SIV program for years, told me. “Our allies’ service to the United States put a target on their backs—the Taliban are coming for them, and if the U.S. fails to uphold its promise to get these Afghans to safety, their lives and that of their families will be lost…. Now, as the clock runs out, every step must be taken by the Biden administration to get our Afghan allies and their families to safety—sort out the bureaucracy tomorrow, but put them on planes today.”
Chief Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters Wednesday that over the past 24 hours, 18 Air Force C-17 transport planes had departed Kabul carrying about 2,000 passengers—a mix of U.S. citizens, Afghan civilians, and NATO personnel. That same day President Biden said in an interview with ABC News that his administration was committed to evacuating all Americans and U.S. allies from Afghanistan and that the effort might stretch beyond his previous August 31 deadline to complete the withdrawal.
In a twist of tragic irony, there are now more U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan than before the withdrawal began, with thousands sent to secure Kabul’s airport. Though long apparent, the Taliban’s swift capture of the country has driven home the point that the two decades and more than $2 trillion spent on the war in Afghanistan, as well as the nearly 2,500 American service member casualties and more than 47,000 Afghan civilian deaths, were for naught. Rose, the former congressman, dismissed this notion. “It is important for us to remember here that for the last 20 years, we have sent a message in a bipartisan fashion that when you attack the United States of America, we will not back down and we will be resolute. And that message withstands and that message will have long-term benefits for our national security,” he said. However, he added that “we can’t be blinded to the realities of the world as it stands and allow for that to continue to, you know, let us spend billions of dollars recklessly, and put men and women in harm’s way recklessly, for no return.”
Jason Kander, the former Missouri secretary of state who served as a military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, echoed the sentiment. “I think we’re all pretty unanimous on: We shouldn’t have been there as long as we were. It doesn’t negate the fact that there are women, you know, there are girls who were educated. There were people who enjoyed freedoms for a 20-year stretch that they wouldn’t have otherwise. It doesn’t mean that that automatically equals the entire endeavor was worth it, but it doesn’t negate that that good was accomplished as well,” he said. “That’s a level of nuance that’s hard for people to hold, but it’s true.”
During the ABC interview on Wednesday, George Stephanopoulos asked Biden if he had “priced in” the possibility that U.S. citizens and allies would struggle to evacuate Afghanistan following the withdrawal. The president responded, “Yes,” but added, “Now, exactly what happened, I’ve not priced in.” The former senior defense official explained that, in their view, one of the reasons the U.S. stayed in Afghanistan for so long—more acutely, the past 10 years—was that the known costs of staying outweighed the unknown costs of leaving. “Well, now we’re seeing the unknown cost of leaving,” they said. “I would hope that there’s a tremendous amount of regret within the administration about the failure to plan for a deliberate withdrawal.”
What the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan will mean for America’s role on the global stage remains unknown. It is too early to say whether the Taliban’s triumph was the final nail in the coffin of American exceptionalism. “It seems that since 9/11, our political response to challenges is to commit money and soldiers to a problem, as if that commitment somehow meant the problem would be solved,” the former ambassador who worked in the region said. “Rather than strategic thinking, rather than working through the difficult cross-cultural problems we might have addressed in 2001-2-3, we thought we could simply say ‘more funding and more troops’ and that American magic, improvisation, would prevail. We have this notion that we roll up our sleeves, spit on our hands, and use our common sense and goodwill to solve problems.
“One thing I can tell you is that I don’t think we’re going to do this again for a while,” this person added. “But that’s what everyone said in 1975, as I recall.”
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