Since Trump is determined that we are going to talk about the Afghanistan withdrawal let’s talk about it. Kevin Drum has the best discussion that I’ve seen:
Regular readers know that I’ve long been annoyed by the relentless use of the word chaotic to describe the Afghanistan withdrawal. Of course it was chaotic. It’s like saying the D-Day landings were chaotic. There’s no way anyone conducts an airlift of 100,000 people in a neat and orderly way from a city that’s just been overthrown by the Taliban.
In any case, since it’s back in the news it’s worth reviewing how the Afghanistan withdrawal played out:
- In early 2020 Donald Trump negotiated with the Taliban for a withdrawal date of May 1, 2021, and the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners held by the Afghan government.
- Over the next year Trump pushed hard to reduce US troop levels. By the end of his term he had reduced the US presence to 2,500 troops.
- When Joe Biden took office, he moved the withdrawal date out to September 11. Trump criticized the change. “We can and should get out earlier,” he said.
- In July Biden changed the withdrawal date to August 31. At this point, the Taliban was fighting but hadn’t yet taken over a single province. The broad assumption was that when the US withdrawal eventually took place the Afghan government would still control the country. The US, naturally, was committed to protecting the government through the withdrawal.
- That changed suddenly because the Afghan army collapsed faster than anyone expected. On August 15 the Taliban took over Kabul and the president of Afghanistan fled the country. With only two weeks to go, this made a large-scale evacuation imperative.
- The withdrawal started chaotically, but within a few hours the Army restored order. Meanwhile, despite the Trump administration’s longtime policy of delaying visa requests, which left a huge backlog of unprocessed applications, the State Department worked heroically to process visas for Afghans who wanted to leave the country.
- In two weeks, the Army evacuated about 90% of Americans in Afghanistan and nearly 100,000 Afghan nationals. By any kind of historical standard, this was a superb performance under the most difficult circumstances imaginable.
The entire operation had only one serious failure: the death of 13 American service members (and 170 Afghans) to an al-Qaeda suicide bomber at Abbey Gate. Multiple investigations by the Pentagon concluded that there wasn’t really anything that could have stopped it.
Everyone processes grief differently, and I can’t bring myself to reproach the families that blame Biden for the deaths of their children. But the fact remains that Biden wasn’t at fault; the Army wasn’t at fault; and deaths in the line of duty are a natural occurrence in war.
The withdrawal wasn’t handled perfectly, but there weren’t any huge mistakes. Nor was it really possible not to withdraw given the situation Biden inherited: the Taliban’s takeover was inevitable as soon as Trump signed the withdrawal agreement with them. It might well have been inevitable even without that. After 20 years it was as clear as it could be that there was simply no more the US could do, and Biden showed a lot of political courage in facing up to that.
In the end, despite everything, the evacuation and airlift were considerable successes—and it’s remarkable that the only serious casualties came from a single al-Qaeda suicide bomber. The blame for that rests squarely on al-Qaeda and no one else.
One hopes that Trump’s need to cast blame and the media’s egregious coverage of the event doesn’t mark it otherwise historically but I think Kevin gets it right. It could never have been anything but a nightmare. Biden was the only president who had the nerve to face that..
The comments over at Kevin’s place are interesting too if you’re of a mind to pursue this.
Oh and by the way, here’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know:
