Contingencies are messy things. The Biden administration’s improvisatory scramble after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban was one of several such messes America witnessed in the final weeks of August. Another was President Joe Biden’s impromptu effort to explain that the shambolic disgrace was among the best possible outcomes.
Biden set an artificial deadline and sleepwalked toward it, igniting a frantic effort in which NATO and non-NATO nations engaged to transit as many of their citizens, residents, and terrified Afghan allies as possible out of the country while Biden contracted with the Taliban to provide perimeter security at the Kabul airport. Over 100,000 people got out, but many more were left behind, including American citizens and permanent residents. Biden congratulated himself. “No nation has ever done anything like it in all of history,” he insisted, “and only the United States had the capacity and the will and ability to do it. And we did it today.”
That American and allied troops were able to solve a sizable portion of the problem the president created was taken as proof that no one could have done better than Biden did. And for anyone who claimed otherwise, Biden appealed to his own ignorance. “I know of no conflict as a student of history, no conflict where when a war was ending, one side was able to guarantee that everyone they wanted to be extracted from that country would get out,” the president claimed.
That curious locution, “everyone they wanted to be extracted” — are there Americans they wouldn’t want to extract? — was made necessary by the administration’s decision to blame those it abandoned. “Since March, we reached out 19 times to Americans in Afghanistan with multiple warnings and offers to help them leave Afghanistan,” Biden argued.
But there’s enough blame to go around, the president contends — it’s also Donald Trump’s fault. A “commitment was made by President Trump” to remove all American troops from Afghanistan by May 1 of this year, he said. That, and not the constant tempo of U.S.-led airstrikes on that militia group resuming a mere four days after that deal was struck, is the only reason American soldiers hadn’t been killed in combat with the Taliban since Feb. 8, 2020. Biden insisted he was bound by the terms of that deal, even though he renegotiated it early in his administration so that Americans would leave Afghanistan no later than Sept. 11, a saccharine flourish the public didn’t appreciate as much as he clearly expected. “Let me be clear, leaving August the 31st is not due to an arbitrary deadline,” Biden said of the arbitrary deadline that replaced 9/11.
Anyway, mission accomplished: “We succeeded in what we set out to do in Afghanistan over a decade ago,” the president declared. The decapitation of al Qaeda in 2011, he suggested, neutralized the organization. The locus of transnational terrorism was no longer Afghanistan, a deadly Islamic State-orchestrated suicide attack killing 13 U.S. Marines just one week earlier, and the retaliatory U.S. strikes that followed, notwithstanding.
Biden and his defenders have tethered themselves to the notion of inevitability, that this disaster was unavoidable and there were no better options. The truth is that these justifications collapse under even cursory scrutiny, and they should not go unchallenged. This historic boondoggle was not inevitable nor optimal. It was a disaster engineered at every step by the Biden administration.
Let’s start with the president’s insistence that there was no way to evacuate the tens of thousands of Americans and our Afghan allies sooner and in a way that didn’t leave untold thousands behind. “Imagine if we’d begun evacuations in June or July, bringing in thousands of American troops, and evacuated more than 120,000 people in the middle of a civil war,” Biden insisted. “There still would have been a rush to the airport, a breakdown in confidence and control of the government, and it still would have been a very difficult and dangerous mission.” This counterfactual is difficult to assess because the Biden administration inexplicably opted to evacuate U.S. military personnel before Western civilians or eligible Afghans.
On July 4, the State Department-run U.S. Embassy in Kabul insisted it was “open & will remain open.” There were “no plans to close the Embassy,” and there are “well-developed security plans to safely protect our personnel & facilities” should any unforeseen eventuality arise. “The likelihood that there’s going to be a Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely,” Biden claimed on July 8. But by the end of July, operating on the assumption that the Afghan National Army could hold out longer than it did, much of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan had already been evacuated.
Even before all U.S. soldiers and equipment had already left Afghanistan, Joe Biden was reluctantly compelled to resume airstrikes on advancing Taliban columns. It was obvious then that Biden’s decision to pull U.S. air support, intelligence sharing, and contractors who could service Afghanistan’s indigenous air force was disastrous. There might have still been time to correct that mistake, but the Biden administration squandered it.
One of the many obstacles to exfiltrating Americans and our allies out of the country after Kabul fell was the abandonment of Bagram Airfield. When the United States left the base, there was no ceremonial handover to Afghan forces. Indeed, our Afghan partners didn’t get so much as a notice of U.S. intentions. On July 6, Americans simply shut off the electricity and left at 3 a.m. When it became unavoidably obvious that this air base would have been a useful asset, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said that the determination was made “in accordance with the mission set that we were given and in accordance with getting the troops down to about a 600, 700 number.” Asked why the military had not retaken the airfield, Milley replied simply, “Good question.”
A more detailed answer to that question, according to reporting, is that the White House would not approve such a mission because it would look bad. “It was discussed but [was] not a good option,” one unnamed defense official told Politico. “Bagram would have been an airborne assault. Just a huge operation. Would have looked like a re-invasion.” Another defense official told Reuters that it would have required as many as 8,000 U.S. troops to secure Bagram, and it would have been subject to Taliban attacks.
An 8,000-strong deployment would have been a substantial increase from the roughly 700 soldiers Biden initially left behind to conclude America’s withdrawal. But Biden reluctantly approved the deployment of 6,000 soldiers to defend the airport in Kabul — a number and posture that was not sufficient to prevent a suicide bomber who killed 13 Americans from wading through the human tide that amassed around the airport. At least Bagram would have been a defensible position. What’s more, keeping the airport open forced Joe Biden to rely on what CENTCOM Commander Gen. Kenneth McKenzie insisted was our “mutual self-interest” with the Taliban in seeing to our speedy exit from the country. Why that self-interest would have dissolved just because we were leaving with more alacrity from within a fortified installation remains unanswered.
The White House’s fear of large American deployments, even at the expense of American interests and allies, contributed to many of the mistakes we made on our way out of Afghanistan and the disgrace we left in our wake. According to an extensive report in the Washington Post, the Taliban were as shocked by their rapid reconquest of Afghanistan as the Biden administration was. But this triumph presented the Taliban with as many problems as opportunities, not the least of which was governing the sprawling capital city. On the night Kabul fell, the head of the Taliban’s political wing, Abdul Ghani Baradar, allegedly offered “two options” to Gen. McKenzie: “You [the United States military] take responsibility for securing Kabul or you have to allow us to do it.”
Certainly, responsibility for Kabul’s security would have necessitated a larger deployment than the initial 700 the White House hoped it could get away with — and it would have involved larger security risks. But it also would have given the United States de facto control of the capital city, and untold influence over the formation of a transitional government after Afghanistan’s elected president fled. But Joe Biden “remained resolute in his decision to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan,” the Post reported. “The collapse of the Afghan government hadn’t changed his mind.”
When the president reluctantly concluded that his obdurate insistence on the smallest possible American military footprint in Afghanistan wasn’t going to get the job done, it was already too late. The U.S. had become utterly dependent upon the Taliban and their State Department-designated terrorist allies to provide Western troops with “security” as they scrambled to evacuate anyone who made it through the Taliban-manned gantlet that ringed the airport.
Americans and their allies were reportedly beaten and harassed, blocked or intimidated away from the airport. Some “close U.S. allies” who made it through were reportedly “turned away” by American officials as Biden’s self-set deadline for total U.S. withdrawal approached. Those Afghans were put at extraordinary risk of reprisal by this vengeful Islamist militia because the Taliban already had their names and identities — some of them provided by the U.S. military.
The administration bristled over the accusation that it gave the Taliban a list to facilitate their already widespread campaign of revenge killings further. Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted that “the idea that we shared lists of Americans or others with the Taliban is simply wrong.” Rather, what the U.S. did was provide the Taliban with the names of key individuals they were to let through into the airport. Sure, it was information that could later be used as a kill list or to facilitate the continuation of what was already a hostage situation in all but name, but it wasn’t intended as one, so the White House couldn’t be blamed for an off-label use as far as it was concerned. Reports of U.S.-allied Afghans being turned away from the airport by Taliban fighters (which was, indeed, the Taliban’s stated policy after Aug. 24) are not hard to come by. But the administration had a point about the necessity of giving the Taliban valuable information regarding the turncoats in their midst. They had no choice in the matter.
And that’s the problem. The mission as it was designed necessitated this betrayal. But it was designed by the Biden administration.
On Aug. 26, as American evacuation efforts were speeding to a close, a “complex” suicide attack, paired with an assault on a nearby hotel U.S. forces used to stage the evacuation effort, killed 13 Americans, two British nationals, and over 100 Afghans. It was the single deadliest day for U.S. forces in Afghanistan in a decade. That night, the president committed America to seeking vengeance. “I have some reason to believe we know who they are,” Biden said. “And we will find ways of our choosing without large military operations to get them wherever they are.”
Hours later, the U.S. executed what it claimed proved the concept of America’s “over-the-horizon counterterrorism” capabilities. That strike killed the “planners and facilitators” of that suicide attack within an Afghanistan-based wing of the Islamic State terror group. But the targets’ names were not released, which is a break from past practice if the targets had been high-profile operatives.
Despite the apparent efficacy of America’s initial retaliatory response, threats to the airport remained imminent and in their operational stages. So, two days later, the U.S. carried out a second strike that reportedly also hit its intended mark. That strike also produced a lot of collateral damage: Ten civilians, including seven children, died in that attack. One of the victims had reportedly worked with American forces as a translator. Another, according to the BBC, “previously worked for international organizations and held visas allowing them entry to the US.”
Clearly, America’s vaunted capacity to disrupt and deter terrorist operations in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region from bases in the Persian Gulf and without reliable intelligence in the area is a matter of some dispute.
The apparent imprecision of the intelligence that informed the planning around these strikes has not dissuaded the Pentagon from entertaining the possibility of further cooperation with the Taliban on counterterrorism issues. “As far as our dealings with them, in war, you do what you must in order to reduce risk to mission and force, not what you necessarily want to do,” Milley said in a statement that called into question just how “over” the war in Afghanistan truly is.
Whether this nascent relationship blossoms into something fruitful or not, the threats to American interests from within Afghanistan will persist. The Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan “is encouraging many jihadists to think about traveling to Afghanistan now instead of Syria or Iraq,” one British official told the Washington Post. “We are now back to 1998, where the Clinton administration was launching missiles at desert camps and hoping to hit something,” one Trump-era counterterrorism official said. “That wasn’t enough to prevent 9/11, and returning to that is not a recipe for success.”
Ultimately, the evacuation effort Biden took so much pride in and credit for failed in its single mission: getting American citizens, legal permanent residents, visa holders, and eligible applicants out. The Biden administration admitted to leaving only between 100 and 250 American citizens behind, though it has previously claimed that there is no way to know precisely how many Americans were in Afghanistan when Kabul fell. The number of green card holders left to the Taliban’s mercies is also unknowable, but it is estimated to be in the thousands. Many more NATO and non-NATO allies are struggling to evacuate their stranded nationals.
Even the herculean multinational effort to get as many people out of Afghanistan as possible could become an albatross around Joe Biden’s neck. Of the over 120,000 people evacuated from Kabul’s airport, only 8,500 were Afghans. “Hundreds of children were separated from their parents. Rogue flights landed without manifests,” the New York Times reported. “Security vetting of refugees was done in hours or days, rather than months or years.” U.S. officials are investigating widespread reports that Afghan children were “married” off to able men so that both would be eligible for evacuation. And despite all this, on Sept. 1, the State Department finally conceded that the United States left behind “the majority” of Afghans who either had visas or were eligible for them, along with their families, but languished on a waiting list. One estimate places that number at around 100,000.
So, yes. This could have gone better. From the beginning of the U.S. drawdown and at almost every haphazard step along the way, the Biden White House stumbled into disaster after disaster. And in the end, all America managed to secure were circumstances that leave Americans less safe at home, less respected abroad, and stained with the dishonor of the broken promises we made to the Afghans who foolishly trusted in the United States. There’s nothing to be proud of in that.
Noah Rothman is associate editor of Commentary magazine.
