After witnessing the Taliban’s seizure of the strategic initiative and its rapid advances across Afghanistan, President Joe Biden has resorted to asking the group to… stop winning.
The State Department says that U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad will ask the Taliban “to stop their military offensive and to negotiate a political settlement.” The statement evinces a profound disconnect from reality.
The U.S. military’s presence in Afghanistan was, prior to Biden’s withdrawal, limited to a few thousand personnel and very few ground combat operations. Instead, that personnel was providing crucial aviation, intelligence, training, and logistics support to Afghan forces. This was not a continuation of war so much as a preservation of relative peace. Relative, yes, but tangible. Eleven Americans died in Afghanistan in 2020, four from combat-related injuries. No Americans have died in Afghanistan in 2021.
As with all U.S. and allied casualties in Afghanistan, these losses are tragic. Nor is it to say that U.S. strategy in Afghanistan was well designed. Going all the way back to 2001, that was very rarely the case. Nor is it to say that a better strategy, more limited in objectives and scale, might have saved many American lives.
Still, the situation Biden faced in 2021 was not the situation President Barack Obama faced in 2009, nor that which President Donald Trump faced in 2017. In 2021, a very limited U.S. presence was providing outsize benefits: the restriction of mass offensives by the Taliban and the provision of a governing structure which, for all its flaws, was generally aligned with U.S. interests. Most of all, the U.S. presence was restricting the Taliban’s ability to seize Afghanistan. And thus also the Taliban’s ability to implement national-level femicide, totalitarianism, and the enabling of terrorist groups such as al Qaeda. It is a lie that the Taliban and al Qaeda are no longer allies.
Now facing the Taliban’s prospective victory, Biden’s only response is to ask them to stop winning. Making matters worse, Biden proudly suggests that he’ll suspend U.S. military air support to the Afghan army come September. The president has apparently forgotten his inaugural pledge to “repair” alliances and “be a strong and trusted partner for peace, progress, and security.”
