Check out the website: https://lenspoliticalnotes.com Look at the recent Political Notes and Len’s Letters on the website. Len’s Letter #23 The Consequences of a Contentious Convention, Len’s Letter #24 The Lily in the Pond, Len’s Letter #36 Where will Donald Trump Live? Len’s Letter #42 America on July 4th, Len’s Letter #44 The USA, Joe Biden and Afghanistan
August 25th 2021 Len’s Letter #44 The USA, Joe Biden, and Afghanistan
2021
I support Joe Biden. In general, that is.
With regard to the withdrawal from Afghanistan, do I support Joe Biden? I have had to think about it. It is, after all, not just Republicans who condemn Joe Biden’s withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan and the subsequent chaos. Democrats have condemned it. Europeans have condemned it. Consider Armin Laschet, Angela Merkel’s successor as leader of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union party, a man whose good relations with immigrants earned him the sobriquet “Turkish Armin.” He will be the next German Prime Minister if the CDU continues its dominance in Germany. He said the withdrawal is “the biggest debacle that NATO has suffered since its founding.”
Despite the views of the critics, we don’t know yet whether the American withdrawal has been a debacle. We know that most Americans, Joe Biden and Donald Trump among them, have wanted the United State out of Afghanistan.
In February, 2020, Donald Trump negotiated an agreement with the Taliban. The US would withdraw from Afghanistan and the Afghan government (which was not a party to the deal) would release 5,000 Taliban prisoners. The US and the Taliban agreed not to attack each other. The Taliban further committed to a reduction in violence against Afghan security forces, to distance themselves from Al Queda and other terrorist organizations (though they rejected the term terrorist) and to negotiate with the Afghan government. The New York Times, reporting on this agreement, noted that, at its peak, the US had more than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, that the year before the agreement was signed was one of the most violent in the history of the war, that the Afghan security forces had carried the burden of the war for the previous five years.
An end of the war was in everyone’s interest. 3,500 allied soldiers were killed, of whom nearly 2,500 were Americans. Approximately 69,000 Afghan security forces were killed during the course of the war, approximately 51,000 Afghan civilians were killed during the course of the war, and approximately 51,000 Taliban fighters were killed. The Afghan security forces had certainly been willing to fight for their country prior to the February, 2020 agreement.
What did the relevant parties do after the agreement?
- The United States
- Reduced its remaining 13,000 person force to 4,000 within a couple of months and to 2,500 by the time Trump left office.
- The Taliban
- Stopped all violence against US forces
- Claimed to have reduced the level of violence against the Afghan security force. If they did, it was not by much.
- They remained a sufficiently violent force that the Defense Department’s Inspector General reported that the Taliban were violating the agreement.
- The IG was uncertain about whether the Taliban were violating the agreement regarding Al Queda. The IG said that Al Queda officers were integrated into the Taliban command
- The Afghani leadership
- Released the prisoners they were required to release – slowly and grudgingly; the last 400 the most grudgingly
- Negotiated with the Taliban in a process that was excruciatingly slow. With US troops less and less a factor and success in sight, the Taliban did not make concessions to the Afghani leadership.
- The Afghani military and village leaders
- Made their own agreements according to the August 15 Washington Post. Cease fires which were actually surrenders were negotiated at the village level and then at the district level. With those agreements, assassinations were avoided. Not a small matter to the people involved. Weapons were handed over to the Taliban in exchange for money leaving ordinary soldiers with nothing to fight with and nothing to fight for.
On January 21, 2021 Joe Biden was faced with few choices. If he repudiated the Trump agreement, the Taliban would attack US forces, which had been reduced to a mere 2,500. If he accepted the agreement, he had to get troops out of Afghanistan by May 1. Joe Biden had other priorities — stopping the pandemic and restarting the US economy. He extended the May 1 deadline for getting US troops out of Afghanistan.
Did he use the period between January 21 and August well, preparing to extract American troops from Afghanistan? Extracting American troops was not a difficult problem. What Joe Biden missed, what he is responsible for when he says “the buck stops here,” was that his fellow Americans did not care only about American troops.
- Americans were not prepared to watch Afghanis killed by a fanatical Afghan regime.
- Americans were not prepared to watch Afghanis beg, with their bodies in front of, along side of, and holding onto American airplanes for a chance to escape a fanatical Afghan regime. American television showed us that.
- Americans knew there were still non-military Americans in Afghanistan who would need to get out. American journalists told us that.
- Americans knew there were Afghanis who worked with the American military and with American journalists and with NGAs who would not survive in a murderous Afghan Taliban regime. American journalists told us that.
- Americans knew that the most vulnerable Afghanis were women who had adopted and lived according to western, that is, American values. American journalists reminded us of that.
- American politicians, many of the architects of the war itself, criticized Joe Biden for failing to have a plan for dealing with all of that. American journalists covered those critics and joined them in criticism.
A consequence has been chaos. Inside the Kabul airport, which is now under control, and immediately outside the gate, which is becoming more controlled. The Guardian reported that 20 people have been killed around the airport perimeter as people desperate to leave competed with each other for access to the airport and as the Taliban beat those who defied their efforts to control who could get closest to the airport.
There is a potential solution. This is not to say that Joe Biden and his administration planned for that solution. What Joe Biden and his administration planned for was a decent interval between American forces leaving Afghanistan and the Afghani regime accepting defeat. Joe Biden and his administration did not think that it was inevitable that the Afghan regime and its military would be defeated. The Village leaders, the local and regional Afghan military commanders, and ultimately the Afghan government didn’t have the same vision that Joe Biden and his administration had. They avoided assassination by the Taliban, took the money they were offered, and acquiesced to the Taliban.
The potential solution rests with the Taliban and with the Afghani people and with Afghani leaders who can conduct a conversation with the Taliban. The potential solution also rests with the United States, with Joe Biden and his administration. The Taliban knows what the solution should appear to be. They announced a general amnesty. They would not take retribution against those who opposed them. They would allow women, within the limits of what Islam allows (the Taliban’s understanding of Islam, of course) the freedom that they seek. The Taliban leadership probably does not believe what they are saying about an amnesty or about freedom for women. Like politicians everywhere, they might believe it when they say it. The Taliban leadership can’t control all their troops, especially when the troops doubt the sincerity of the orders for moderation. Few believe an amnesty or a new approach to women by the Taliban is sustainable.
The Taliban leadership is talking with former Afghan leaders – those who would not or did not or were not in a position to abscond with car loads of money. These are problematic former Afghan leaders who have been intermediaries before. Sarah Chayes recalls Hamid Karzai as the man who negotiated the entrance of the then Pakistan-sponsored Taliban into Afghanistan. Karzai now chairs the coordinating committee negotiating the Taliban’s return to power in 2021.
Under those circumstances, can they all find a solution? A short-term solution would reflect the Taliban announcement of moderation. Some Afghans would believe the promise of moderation. Fewer would feel they must leave their homeland – for their personal safety, for the possibility of a successful life. If fewer Afghans were to feel the urgency to leave, it would be easier to create conditions on the ground – cooperation between the US military and the Taliban – so that those who still want to leave are able to. But is this the kind of solution they will negotiate? On behalf of the non-Taliban Afghans, we have Hamid Karzai. On behalf of the US we have Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad. Retained from the Trump administration where he negotiated Trump’s deal that Joe Biden inherited, formerly of the Bush administration, his idea of working for American interests was negotiating an oil pipeline across Afghanistan with the Taliban.
This is not to suggest that the Taliban have many interests other than to impose Sharia law on their country. They do have one interest unrelated to Sharia law. They need to have a country that is not so broken that it cannot be governed, not so broken and poor that people are dying from starvation and disease and violence. The Afghan government is broke. What money it does have is in American hands, in the hands of Joe Biden and his administration. What will the Biden administration expect from the Taliban? Do those former Afghan leaders speaking with the Taliban leadership share the interests of the United States? Does Zalmay Khalizad share the interests of the Biden administration for which he works? Can Joe Biden’s administration substitute improvisation for a lack of previous planning?
Americans worry that China could cause trouble, but the Taliban is as great a horror for them as it is for the United States. The same is true of Russia. Al Queda or other terrorist groups could create an act of terror. Joe Biden’s administration appears to be particularly worried about an attack on those around the perimeter of the Kabul Airport. A substantial portion of the journalists of the world are focused on the crowds that surround the airport. Most in those in the crowd have a heart wrenching story about why they must leave Afghanistan, why they must get into the airport. Planes now land and take off without killing people. Joe Biden’s administration has enlisted planes from the private sector to take evacuees to the second leg of their journey. What would the consequence be of a terrorist attack on the airport perimeter? Or the airport itself?
Comparisons with the evacuation of Vietnam continue. The American military were gone from Vietnam in 1973 as a product of the Paris Peace Accords negotiated by the Nixon administration. The South Vietnamese continued fighting for two years. American analysts thought the South was on the verge of victory when the North Vietnamese offensive began on March 10, 1975. Americans began leaving Saigon at the end of March. Because the Defense Attache Office was prohibited from bringing Vietnamese allies to the US, throughout April American allies were brought to the Philippines. More extractions followed. “Operation Babylift” evacuated 2,000 orphans. “Operation New Life” evacuated more than 110,000 Vietnamese refugees. On April 29, the penultimate day of evacuations, 395 Americans were evacuated as were 4,000 Vietnamese. On April 30, the last day of evacuation, 978 Americans were removed and, despite President Ford’s order to evacuate only Americans, about 1,100 more Vietnamese were evacuated. There were fifty-one days between the start of the North Vietnamese final offensive and what appeared to be the end of an American presence in Vietnam.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban began an offensive on May 1, 2021 – when the US was supposed to have withdrawn its forces. The offensive accelerated in early August and, in the culmination of what has been described as an 11 day collapse of the Afghan security forces, the Taliban took control of city after city and finally Kabul where they declared the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan on August 15. 685 of the Afghan leadership escaped by plane to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The US announced the deployment of 3,000 additional troops to Kabul Airport for its rescue operation. The UK deployed 600 additional troops.
What then, is a reasonable goal? Joe Biden and his administration would ensure that all Americans who want to leave have left, ensure that Afghani allies who want to leave get to leave, ensure that participants in NGAs who want to leave have left, and then take the remaining military back to the US. If that gets done without chaos, without Americans being killed, Joe Biden and his administration will have accomplished an enormous task. Now that Joe Biden and his administration has accepted responsibility to rescue American allies, will he and can he rescue, a hefty number of these allies? Can he rescue all the Americans who want to leave? Can he do all of that while he retains the August 31 deadline?
Critics will remain. Joe Biden shoulda, woulda, coulda.
If he removed Americans and the allies of the military and journalists and NGAs by May 1 or, say, by August 1, then there would have been no chaos. Says them.
If he kept the military in place, the Taliban would not have returned to attacking the American military. 2,500 troops in and around Kabul was enough to fend off attacks. Or more could have been added if needed. Says them.
Either way, Joe Biden would have avoided the debacle. Says them.
I will say it again: If Joe Biden and his administration can navigate this complexity, peacefully ensure that all Americans who want to leave have left, ensure that Afghani allies who want to leave have left, ensure that those from the NGAs who want to leave have left, and then take the remaining military back to the US, he will have succeeded. If he can do all that and, as he has now committed himself, meet the August 31 deadline, the American withdrawal will have become a triumph instead of a debacle. If he is leaving people behind, it will be a disappointment, but not a conclusion. Says I, still a supporter of Joe Biden. Remember. Many Vietnamese left after 1975