No to Lindsey Graham’s anti-Taliban resistance idea

But once the last flight departs from the Kabul airport on Aug. 31, the White House will be presented with another challenge: how to deal with the Taliban over the long term. Thus far, the Biden administration has taken a practical approach out of necessity: With roughly 1,000 Americans left in Afghanistan, the United States has no choice but to coordinate in some fashion with the Taliban.

Some, though, have other ideas.

In a joint press release on Friday, Rep. Mike Waltz and Sen. Lindsey Graham proposed extensive U.S. support to a group of anti-Taliban factions in the Panjshir Valley. That group refers to itself as the National Resistance Front. The two lawmakers called on the Biden administration to recognize the Front’s leadership as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. The proposal comes a little more than a week after Ahmad Massoud, the son of the famed Afghan resistance fighter Ahmad Shah Massoud, appealed for Western support.

There are likely some elements within the U.S. intelligence community who find this idea worthy of consideration. In terms of policy, however, Waltz and Graham’s initiative is the definition of reckless.

For a start, Washington is still scrambling to get Americans on departure flights at the Kabul airport. Some amount of cooperation with the Taliban is imperative. Taliban fighters have the airport surrounded and are operating a labyrinthine system of checkpoints around the facility. If you aren’t an American who is fortunate enough to be taken to the airport by helicopter, the only way to get through the gates is by passing through those checkpoints. To date, the Taliban have been relatively tolerant of allowing Americans free passage (to be clear, there have been exceptions of violence over the past week). But all of this would be at risk were Washington to provide Massoud with U.S. backing. More Americans could presumably be left stranded.

A broader point: Supporting the weaker side in a civil war never goes particularly well for the United States. Take Syria. In its quest to overthrow Bashar Assad’s regime, the Obama administration authorized a covert program to arm and train the so-called moderate Syrian armed opposition. The logic was simple enough: By sending anti-Assad fighters the arms and equipment they needed for operations, Assad would eventually be pressured into either exile or negotiating a face-saving resignation.

Instead, those weapons simply incentivized Assad’s backers, Russia and Iran, to increase their own military support to Damascus. This, in turn, expanded the civil war and resulted in higher civilian casualties. Some of those weapons were even captured or sold to the very jihadists the U.S. was trying to neutralize. While it’s true the dynamics of the conflict in Afghanistan are different from those in Syria, it’s difficult to see how arming the losing side will do anything but hurt Afghanistan’s population.

There are long-term costs to what Waltz and Graham are lobbying for.

Just because U.S. troops will no longer be in Afghanistan doesn’t mean U.S. policymakers will stop counterterrorism work in Afghanistan. The CIA will still be active in the country, even if the Biden administration doesn’t publicize it. Effective counterterrorism work requires sources willing to give the agency information on terrorists who are planning an attack against U.S. interests. Inevitably, some of those sources will be former enemies such as the Taliban, a group that has their own reasons to fight organizations such as ISIS-K.

Yet this cooperation will be much less forthcoming if the U.S. is simultaneously offering military and political goodies to an armed, anti-Taliban movement seeking to displace the Taliban by force. We shouldn’t assume some elements of the Taliban won’t be open to a tactical arrangement with the U.S. against a shared enemy. Waltz and Graham apparently believe it’s worth killing this type of arrangement in its crib.

Facts matter. The Taliban are the dominant power in Afghanistan. The U.S. needs to work through this reality, not pursue harebrained schemes with no chance of success.

Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.