Speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan claimed that the Biden administration had leverage to get Americans out of Afghanistan after President Joe Biden’s arbitrary Aug. 31 deadline. “The leverage we have, the economic leverage, and the other forms of leverage we continue to possess, we believe will be effective in ensuring that we can get out other people who want to come out after the 31st of August.”
Sullivan’s remarks should set off alarm bells across Washington.
Consider what Sullivan might mean by economic leverage: As of April 2021, the Afghanistan Central Bank had reserves of $9.4 billion, much of which was physically held in the United States. The Taliban, which now claims to be Afghanistan’s legitimate government, is likely to claim that money as their own. Sullivan’s comments suggest the White House is willing to use that cash as a carrot in forthcoming negotiations. There is ample precedent. The Carter administration agreed in the 1981 Algiers Accords to unfreeze assets and remove trade sanctions on the Islamic Republic in exchange for the Islamic Republic’s release of 52 American hostages. For all his tough talk, Ronald Reagan also incentivized hostage-taking when he offered Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime arms in exchange for Americans seized by Iran’s Hezbollah proxies in Lebanon.
President Barack Obama took ransom payments to a new level when he not only paid $1.4 billion for Americans Iran had illegally seized but also provided those funds in cash. That made subsequent tracing near impossible. While Obama spun the payment as simply the resolution of an unrelated decades-old dispute, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps described the payment as a ransom. They should have known, because Iranian officials loaded the money onto an IRGC aircraft. Those funds accelerated Iran’s malign behavior throughout the region.
Top line: Biden projects weakness, and the Taliban are prepared to exploit that to the fullest.
A partial payment is as impossible as being only partially pregnant: To provide anything would signal recognition of the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate that would essentially grease the Taliban’s claim to all the money.
Sullivan was careful to suggest that American leverage was not just economic. Perhaps the U.S. is flirting with diplomatic recognition. Again, this has precedent. Prior to the 9/11 terror attacks, the Taliban lobbied Washington, even hiring the daughter-in-law of former CIA director Richard Helms. The Taliban made three main arguments.
First, they said they had closed terror training camps and quarantined al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. Second, they argued that they controlled 90% of the country. Third, they said they were no worse than Saudi Arabia. Such arguments had resonance.
There were career-killing articles in the pipeline at the National Defense University arguing for recognizing the Taliban on those grounds, which authors retracted when al Qaeda hijackers crashed planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. At least one such author ended up serving on the National Intelligence Council.
Pakistan already recognizes the Taliban and pays them customs duties from their shared border, and China will follow suit. Perhaps Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Sullivan will say that recognition is just recognizing reality. However, that too would be a mistake as it not only betrays the opposition now forming in the Panjshir Valley but would also enable the Taliban to claim rewards from international organizations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund more easily.
If Biden and Sullivan believe they maintain military leverage, they are foolish: If such leverage existed, arguing against “forever wars” undercut it. And while Biden ordered strikes on those responsible for conducting a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport, the nature of suicide is that death is not a disincentive. As U.S. forces leave, the flow of useful intelligence will slow to a trickle and dry up.
Partisans may bicker about whether former President Donald Trump or Biden deserves the most blame for the Afghanistan withdrawal, but they cannot deny that it has been a strategic and moral disaster. If Sullivan’s comments are any indication, the humiliation is not over. Team Biden has left the Taliban tens of billions of dollars worth of U.S. hardware, and now, in the name of leverage to end the worst hostage crisis in American history, they appear prepared to pay the Taliban nearly $10 billion.
It is time to bring Sullivan and Blinken before Congress to seek clarity and craft a bipartisan way forward.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
