Criticism from All Sides

President Biden is receiving criticism from many quarters over the situation in Afghanistan.

David Ignatius in the Washington Post

For President Biden, who had hoped for an orderly U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the chaos in Kabul carries echoes of the fall of Saigon in 1975 — precisely the image he wanted to avoid. And the Taliban’s drive for military victory — ignoring pledges to negotiate a transition of power — will raise questions about whether its promises to prevent al-Qaeda from rebuilding safe havens in Afghanistan can be trusted.

and

The Taliban will have difficulty swallowing Afghanistan, for all its success on the battlefield. Afghanistan has become an increasingly urban and modern society since the U.S. invasion in 2001. The Taliban’s military forces number only about 80,000, in a country of about 39 million. For millions of Afghan women, who have been attending schools and universities the past two decades and sharing in a freer country, the prospect of a Taliban return to power is especially bleak.

The beneficiaries of the American occupation will undoubtedly be those who suffer most under a return to Taliban rule. That’s just stating the obvious.

Frederick W. Kagan in the New York Times

A disastrous Taliban takeover wasn’t inevitable. President Biden said his hands were tied to a withdrawal given the awful peace deal negotiated between the Trump administration and the Taliban. But there was still a way to pull out American troops while giving our Afghan partners a better chance to hold the gains we made with them over the last two decades.

Mr. Biden chose otherwise. The way he announced the drawdown and eventual departure of American troops — at the start of the fighting season, on a rapid timeline and sans adequate coordination with the Afghan government — has in part gotten us into the current situation.

Reasonable people can disagree about the wisdom of keeping American military forces in Afghanistan indefinitely, even at very low numbers. I and others have argued that the investment, including the risk to American personnel, is worth it to prevent militant groups from once again overrunning the country.

Mr. Biden believes that further expending U.S. resources in Afghanistan is “a recipe for being there indefinitely.” He rightly notes that President Trump had left him few good options by making a terrible deal with the Taliban. That’s a fine argument, but it explains neither the hastiness nor the consequences we are now observing: the Taliban overrunning swathes of the country, closing in on Kabul, pushing the Afghan security forces and government to the brink of collapse and prompting the Pentagon to prepare for a possible evacuation of the U.S. embassy.

The Editors of the Wall Street Journal

Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates famously wrote that President Biden has been on the wrong side of every major foreign-policy issue in his long career. The world is getting another example as Mr. Biden’s hell-bent, ill-planned withdrawal from Afghanistan is turning into a strategic defeat and moral debacle.

The Taliban march to Kabul continues with the fall of more provincial capitals each day. The last count was 12 capitals, including Ghazni City on the road between the major cities of Kandahar and Kabul. Reinforcing Afghan forces defending Kandahar will become harder if the road is blocked.

The Afghan government is trying to mount a counterattack, and President Ashraf Ghani has sacked another army chief. But the Taliban now controls at least eight entire provinces, according to the Long War Journal, and its reach includes areas in the north that the Taliban didn’t control when it ruled the country before 9/11. The city of Herat also fell Thursday, and Kandahar could be next.

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The White House has failed to understand what’s happening, with leaks saying the Administration is surprised by the Taliban assault. Surprised? The military warned Mr. Biden and so did U.S. intelligence. The Taliban began this offensive on May 1, two weeks after Mr. Biden announced his withdrawal, aiming for the symbolic date of Sept. 11.

For the umpteenth time, back in 2001, recognizing that some forceful response was politically necessary after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, I advocated the most ferocious punitive raid in history, harsh and destructive enough to discourage any country entertaining the prospect of playing host to terrorists. I argued against “boots on the ground” and occupying the country because I envisioned this day.

All of those criticizing the withdrawal clearly want a permanent occupation of Afghanistan since that’s the only strategy that would have prevented what will happen. Some are explicit in their aims; for all they are at least implicit. All point to consequences for withdrawing. None point to the consequences of a permanent occupation of an otherwise strategically meaningless landlocked country in the middle of Asia. Those would be extremely dire.

I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, hoping that he would have the sense and the courage to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan. He didn’t. I presume he was persuaded otherwise by the general staff and political advisors. I don’t know what has given Joe Biden the spine to go through with it. I don’t agree with those who see him as a doddering ancient, so demented he is not responsible for his own policies. In the unlikely event that he’s entertaining the notion of a second term, withdrawing from Afghanistan and the consequences of that withdrawal will undoubtedly be arguments wielded by his political opponents against him. That doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do under the circumstances.

Update

James Joyner has a roundup of reaction as well.