President Joe Biden has turned a strategic withdrawal from Afghanistan into an ignominious capitulation — or worse.
The events of recent weeks in Afghanistan raise critical questions about America’s longest war, the evolving Islamist terrorist threat, the limits of American power, and failures in U.S. global leadership. But it would be a mistake to draw grand conclusions from the immediate disaster that has unfolded in Kabul. Whatever the answers to the big questions, the catastrophe now before us was completely avoidable.
Rightly, the concern of the moment is rescuing civilians: thousands of Americans, Britons, Australians, Germans, and French — and tens of thousands of Afghan allies. And not just in Kabul. Some are in Kandahar, in Herat, in Ghazni, in Mazar-i-Sharif, and on and on. For 10 days, the U.S. State Department advised all Americans everywhere in Afghanistan to travel to the Kabul airport, with zero guidance on how to get there.
Reports of harassment and violence against Americans approaching the airport grew until Thursday morning when, five short days before Biden’s Aug. 31 U.S. military departure deadline, suicide bombers struck an airport gate and a nearby hotel, injuring or killing dozens, including Afghan civilians and U.S. Marines, blocking further access to the airport.
Some, notably former Army Ranger Rep. Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat, and retired Gen. Jack Keane, have called for U.S. military threats and immediate escalation, with no deadline for departure from the airport until we get all Americans and allies out of Afghanistan. Proposals include forcibly opening civilian escape corridors into the heart of Kabul and forced military rescues of Americans and allies hiding in Kabul and elsewhere.
But how are we actually to do that? The U.S. today has no military footprint anywhere in the country outside the fence-line of the Kabul airport. Biden’s decision, against military advice, to abandon heavily fortified Bagram Air Base is one of a series of catastrophically bad decisions that led to this disaster. In fact, the most basic sequencing rules of strategic withdrawal — civilians, military equipment, diplomats before troops — were tossed aside.
Air combat operations cannot be run out of Kabul airport. Without air support, we cannot send special forces teams to rescue people without tremendous risk. The U.S. no longer has in-country intelligence and air targeting and extraction support capabilities to prevent such operations from becoming a hundred “Black Hawk Downs.” Such operations should continue in certain instances, especially in the current chaos, but cannot possibly save the thousands now in hiding.
Biden’s reckless decisions have squandered any real leverage we once had over the Taliban. Yes, we could still mount a massive bombing campaign. But the U.S. military no longer has eyes in the country for precision targeting, and the Taliban are now in the cities, so effective bombing risks killing large numbers of civilians, potentially including Americans.
Even worse, U.S. troops at the airport are in an indefensible military position. Hamid Karzai International Airport is a civilian facility surrounded by dense residential neighborhoods in a city of 4.6 million people. We know, and the Taliban know we know, that they could shut down that airport in minutes, in so many different ways. They don’t have to shoot at our planes. All they have to do is let in thousands of desperate Afghans, infiltrated by Taliban, to surge the airstrip and the entire grounds of the airport. They have us in a chokehold and they know it.
The bottom line: Our troops at Kabul airport are, in effect, hostages. The Taliban are now in a position to dictate terms to us, as they never were in any previous U.S. administration. We can do nothing to confront the Taliban anywhere in a militarily significant way until our forces have departed the airport with as many civilians as possible. Even then, we will leave behind thousands of Americans and allied civilians — fodder for Taliban/ISIS-K hostage-taking that could become a Tehran ’79 on steroids.
We could now, for example, be using air power to destroy the billions of dollars worth of attack planes, Black Hawk helicopters, drones, and other weapons and military equipment that U.S. and Afghan forces abandoned to the Taliban. We could be supporting anti-Taliban holdouts in the Panjshir Valley, helping them constitute their new anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, the National Resistance Front. All in preparation for the inevitable military strikes the president will order against the Taliban when al Qaeda or ISIS-K organize future terrorist attacks on Americans. But thanks to Biden’s foolhardiness, we cannot.
So our objective today remains getting Americans, allied citizens, and Afghan friends out of the country without a firefight. But if the Taliban, al Qaeda, or ISIS-K prevent this, and do worse, all bets are off. Kinetic military action may be required, including carving out a defensive perimeter and escape corridors around the airport (assuming U.S. forces remain there), retaking Bagram Air Base, and aggressively extracting civilian Americans and others from Kabul and elsewhere. All require a major surge of U.S. forces back into Afghanistan. But make no mistake. It would be a bloodbath.
A controlled strategic withdrawal from our longest war is now an ignominious capitulation with the prospect of a renewed, bloodier war.
Greg Gross is a former senior Defense Department official in the George W. Bush administration.
