Former President Donald Trump should stifle his criticisms of President Joe Biden’s debacle in Afghanistan. While Biden clearly merits the lion’s share of the blame, Trump set the disaster in motion, and there is little reason to believe Trump would have handled the endgame any better.
Andrew McCarthy recently recapped at National Review how Trump had negotiated directly with the Taliban while cutting Afghanistan’s legitimate government entirely out of the discussions. Trump forced the release of 5,000 hardened Taliban fighters from prison. He secured the release from a Pakistani prison of the Taliban’s Abdul Ghani Baradar, who now is the de facto president of the Taliban-led “government” in Afghanistan. Trump further undercut the prior government by saying he wanted to invite leading Taliban terrorists to Camp David.
Trump himself set the absurdly early May 1 withdrawal deadline (which Biden extended, but not for long enough), which would have abandoned the Afghan army in the midst of the traditional spring fighting season. Trump ignored advice from senior officials who urged him not to pull out at all when American forces were maintaining at least a productive stalemate without a single combat loss of American life in a full year.
For the cost of that relative stasis, the U.S. secured key intelligence into terrorist networks, kept terrorists from having a secure base of operations for international strikes, and enjoyed a superb air base, useful in deterring Russian and Chinese aggression.
Trump abandoned all that and left no realistic plan to evacuate American and allied personnel by his own deadline.
Trump now issues thrice-daily email attacks, blasting Biden for the disaster, repeatedly calling on Biden to resign. For example, Trump said this: “Joe Biden must apologize to America for allowing the Military to leave before civilians and for allowing $85 Billion dollars worth of sophisticated Military equipment to be handed over to the Taliban (and Russia and China so they can copy it) rather than bringing it back to the United States!”
But Trump’s own record suggests he would have done no better. For comparison, consider the far easier bug-out from Syria that Trump ordered. There, the United States had total control of the timing and means of withdrawal. Yet Trump botched the evacuation in what a Wall Street Journal headline described as the “Sand and Blood and Death” of “America’s Chaotic Retreat.” The parallels between the retreat in Syria and that in Afghanistan are striking.
Valued allies (Kurds, Afghan translators) abandoned without a chance to be rescued? Yes. Haphazard and rushed abandonment of an airfield to our enemies? Yes. A virtual gift to our enemies of many tons of highly valuable military equipment? Yes. In all, reported the Wall Street Journal, the abandonment of Syria was a “cascade of chaos that upended U.S. policy in the Middle East, cast doubt on America’s reliability as an ally and allowed Washington’s adversaries to fill the void. … [while] Russia expands its influence.” And a humanitarian crisis as well: “Fighters allied with the U.S. and at least dozens of civilians, including women and children, were butchered.”
Sound familiar? Of course. Trump himself set the template for the mortifyingly shameful surrender that Biden now has incurred.
It does nothing to diminish the level of Biden’s guilt to say that Trump is guilty, too. Two presidents in a row have shown perfidious dereliction, from which U.S. diplomacy and security have suffered.
