British Prime Minister Boris Johnson characterized the Taliban’s rapid conquest of Afghanistan as a predictable consequence of President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces.
“I think it’s been clear for many months that the situation could go very fast, and that’s been part of the intelligence briefing,” Johnson told British troops who just returned from Kabul. “There have also been suggestions that the Afghan national defense force might hold on for longer. But logically, you can see what happened.”
Johnson’s assessment puts pressure on Biden’s argument that his administration was blindsided by the Taliban’s victory, a claim that has been cited to explain miscalculations that governed the U.S. withdrawal plans. The ensuing chaos has spurred a round of backbiting in London, compounded by dismay at American decision-making.
“The reality is this is a decision by not only this president, but two former presidents to effectively announce a departure, sign the instruments of surrender, and then withdraw in three different terms,” British lawmaker Tom Tugendhat, the chairman of the foreign affairs select committee, said Thursday during a Policy Exchange think tank event. “And that is an extraordinary thing for three successive U.S. administrations to do.”
Biden argued throughout the withdrawal that the United States left the Afghan military well positioned to thwart the Taliban advance and force the militants into serious peace talks.
“You have the Afghan troops. They’re 300,000 well-equipped, as well equipped as any army in the world, and an air force against something, like, 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable,” the president said on July 8. “They clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place.”
That assessment rang hollow with foreign officials monitoring the situation. One Indo-Pacific intelligence official said that Biden gave the Taliban “the best option [for them] which was available” by opting unexpectedly for a full withdrawal. Two weeks after Biden’s speech, an internal British Foreign Office memo offered a pessimistic prognosis.
“On Afghanistan, peace talks are stalled, and U.S.-NATO withdrawal is resulting in rapid Taliban advances,” the Foreign Office’s Principal Risk Register analysts stated on July 22. “This could lead to the fall of cities, collapse of security forces, Taliban returned to power, mass displacement and significant humanitarian need. The embassy may need to close.”
A senior Afghan lawmaker revealed that same week that the Afghan Air Force had run out of precision-guided bombs, a shortage that he attributed to the fact that the “hasty withdrawal” happened so quickly that U.S. and NATO forces neglected to allocate a sufficient arsenal for the overtaxed Afghan warplanes.
“[The withdrawal] can only be described as a hasty, crassly-handled surrender to the very people that we fought and defeated 20 years ago,” former NATO Secretary-General George Robertson said during the Policy Exchange panel.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Johnson concluded that the loss of air support was the key factor. “Once people felt in Afghanistan, once people in the Afghan army felt that they were no longer going to be getting that American air cover, then, I think, the logic for them became really to end their resistance, and so, things did go faster,” he said.
