Afghanistan: Biden and Trump—the Same Cowardice

The following essay was published in Le Figaro on August 9, 2021, and appears here in translation with the permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, with comments here.

On Sunday, August 8, 2021, the Afghan Taliban took three provincial capitals, including Kunduz, the large city in the north of Afghanistan, close to the frontier with Tajikistan on the road that leads from Kabul to Dushanbe. Kunduz was previously the general quarter of the German forces intervening within the NATO framework. [First Quartermaster General Erich] Ludendorff once called August 8, 1918, a “day of mourning for the German army.” August 8, 2021, will certainly remain a “day of mourning” for the Afghan army that the Americans have been training and equipping for twenty years. As panic feeds panic, and debacle leads to debacle, one cannot see how the Afghan army will be able to prevent the imminent fall of Kandahar, Mezar, Herat, and Jalalabad, before facing definitive defeat at Kabul.

At Donald Trump’s instigation, America signed an agreement in February 2020 at Doha with the Taliban (against whom it had been waging war since October 2001), following negotiations to which the legitimate government of Afghanistan was not invited. In the Doha agreement, the Americans basically said to the Taliban: “We will leave on the condition that you promise not to harbor the enemies of America and that you enter negotiations in good faith to share power with the government in Kabul.”

The Taliban did not start any serious negotiation with the Afghan government, but Joe Biden decided nonetheless to abandon Afghanistan and leave the Afghans to their fate. He withdrew all American soldiers, somewhat before the symbolic date that he had announced of September 11, 2021. The demoralization effect on the Afghan army was immediate.

As a result, for the twentieth anniversary of the enormous attacks on New York and Washington, which Osama bin Laden had hatched in the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, America risks having, instead of a candle, the giant flame of Kabul falling back into the hands of the Taliban.

What will happen to all these young Afghan men, who sincerely supported the democratic regime sustained by NATO, and to these young Afghan women who genuinely believed that the hour of their emancipation had arrived? The images may be terrible, if they ever reach us.

Twenty years ago, America did not have to give all those false hopes to the Afghan population. After the fall of Kabul, on November 13, 2001, to its Tazik and Uzbek allies of the Northern Alliance, it would have sufficed for the United States to purge the country of the international Islamist Arab combatants that had carried out the attacks of September 11 and then to leave.

But America freely made a more ambitious choice—perhaps too ambitious. It was at the international conference that it convened in Bonn on December 5, 2001, where it announced that it would “reconstruct, democratize, and develop” Afghanistan. Believing itself then clearly superior to the Soviet Union of the 1980s, it imagined it would succeed easily. It gravely underestimated the size and difficulty of the task.

Yet once one has invested in a country and created a new ecosystem, it is very dangerous to depart precipitously. All the American generals have said as much. It would not have been very costly to keep at least the large air base at Bagram, an effective military instrument. Yet both Trump and Biden were obstinate in their wish for a rapid and total departure: the former because he is fundamentally opposed to all foreign interventions, and the latter because his diplomacy is subordinate to his domestic politics and the hope to reconquer the blue-collar electorate, the white working class that had been seduced by Trumpism and isolationism.

Thanks to advances in military surgery, the American army operations have seen proportionately many fewer fatalities than was the case in the Vietnam War (1965–1975). But there are many more disabled veterans. Their visible presence reduces support for the war among the middle classes of small American towns.

Domestic politics is the worst counselor there can be for foreign policy, which plays out over long periods, not subject to electoral deadlines. The fall of Kabul will considerably weaken America’s hand in the world. The Iranians, the Turks, the Russians, and the Chinese will view the United States as a giant on feet of clay, incapable of strategic constancy. If I were Taiwanese, I would be very worried.

Trump and Biden have shared the same cowardice. America will pay the geopolitical consequences. They will be worse than those responsible ever imagined. Europe would do well to prepare itself.