Renaud Girard is an American-born French journalist, the author of several books on world affairs, especially the Middle East. In this trenchant commentary on the Afghan debacle, he recognizes the defeat for what it is, bluntly invoking the collapse of the imperial German army at the end of the First World War. Is that an overstatement or an unflinching naming of the collapse of an order? Girard brings a realist eye to the factors that have contributed to the current situation, asking us to understand them and their consequences, as the Taliban proceed from city to city, heading toward Kabul.
First, it is important to note that Girard does not call into question the original goal to track down and defeat the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington: that would have meant a strategy of pursuing and eliminating al-Qaeda, but then departing. Yet mission creep and idealistic hubris soon turned that narrow project into a much more expansive one to remake Afghanistan, in the spirit of high-minded democracy promotion and neoconservatism. The initial intent of defeating a fanatic adversary became a plan for nation-building and modernization. Future historians will have to deliberate as to how this metamorphosis took place, and whether that aspiration to remake Afghan society as a liberal democracy was genuinely plausible. Was it merely abandoned too soon—or did it simply assume too much transformative capacity on the part of any occupying force? Whatever future historical judgments find, by opting for the ambitious project of democratization, the United States, according to Girard, made promises to the Afghan youth about a democratic future that it is now failing to keep. A sense of betrayal will surely be part of the bitter consequences of the Afghanistan departure.
In addition, despite the generally perceived political polarization in the United States, Girard points out the considerable continuity in foreign policy between Trump and Biden: both insisted on their intent to withdraw from Afghanistan, albeit due to different personal inclinations and political contexts. Yet at least Trump seemed to condition withdrawal on the Taliban’s meeting certain terms. How he would have responded to the breaches of the Doha agreement that Biden now appears to tolerate, we will never know. In any case, the domestic American political discourse that treats the Biden administration as the diametrical opposite of its predecessor ought to face up to the fact of this strange congruence in terms of leaving Afghanistan.
Of particular note however is the apparent lack of any extensive planning on the part of the Biden administration as to how to respond to the Taliban advances and the vulnerability of the Afghan army. It is as if the administration barely cares about the violations of the Doha conditions. Furthermore, the patchwork policy concerning expedited visas for Afghan translators who supported the U.S. military appears to have been put together at the last minute and on the fly, in response to public pressure, although the problem ought to have been anticipated. Nor does there seem to be much of a plan for the prospective wave of other Afghan refugees—those who have no claim on having been employed by the Americans or their allies, but who simply want to escape the Taliban onslaught. Will we soon witness another crisis of displacement, as took place in Syria in 2015? Where will the path of destabilization lead these refugees—through Turkey and the E.U.? Neither of them will accept a new wave of displaced persons easily. The enthusiastic welcome that refugees encountered in Germany seven years ago will not be repeated. Nor however will one be able to fault Afghans for trying to escape the brutality of the Taliban regime. There is a crisis in the making, simultaneously humanitarian and political, that Washington should have foreseen, since it is a direct result of the precipitousness of the withdrawal.
Lastly, Girard spells out a realistic assessment of the global consequences of the withdrawal. In addition to the catastrophe for Afghans themselves, the rout also means that American security guarantees will lose credibility elsewhere in the world. America’s adversaries will henceforth doubt American tenacity, and the perception of Biden as weak will be reinforced. On this point, the contrast with his predecessor will be clear. Precisely that sense of weakness in the current White House encourages the Taliban to ignore its Doha obligations.
We can also anticipate that America’s allies will lose trust. Girard’s chilling comment “If I were Taiwanese, I would be very worried” cuts to the bone. Smaller, dependent states that count on America for security but that are now forced to doubt the reliability of their protector can either invest aggressively in their own security capacity—and thereby gain a degree of autonomy for independent operations—or they can hedge their bets and explore limited accommodation with the powers that threaten them. In other words, the result of the perceived weakening of the American security umbrella, which is the only conclusion one can draw from Afghanistan, may lead vulnerable states to rebalance their strategies between the United States and adversarial powers. This kind of “bet hedging” will hardly enhance American influence—such is the implication of Girard’s sober estimation of the costs of neoconservative overreach.
His concluding remark, however, is the one that poses the most significant challenge to American security strategy. “Europe would do well to prepare itself.” So beyond any speculations as to the meaning of the Afghanistan events for the confrontation with Islamism, Girard points to the repercussions of the American withdrawal for Europe’s own defense policies. It is not however the withdrawal itself but the abrupt and unilateral character of the decision, without attention to contingencies, that could lead Europeans to ask whether this Central Asian episode sheds light on the reliability of American security commitments in Europe: the Afghan outcome therefore poses the NATO question and may well reopen deliberations on a strategic autonomy for Europe. That is a discussion that will play out especially in Paris. Meanwhile, for Washington, any step forward from Afghanistan will have to involve efforts to reestablish the credibility of American protective capacity, coupled with a realistic recognition of the limits of American influence.
No one. No one should trust American security guarantees. The old “politics ends at the water’s edge” idea has been dead for many decades. Korea stalemate. Vietnam debacle. Iraq abandonment. Afghanistan bug-out.
It would be difficult to find a more complete illustration of the feckless- the cowardly nature of our leaders than the abandonment of our 9-11 memorial at Bagram airbase. We actually left one of the steel pillars from the WTC for the Taliban to desecrate. (With what’s been going on in our country these last few years, we can hardly complain if they do.)
Is it impossible to imagine the blow to Afghan government troop morale to witness the Americans running for the exit quite literally under cover of darkness?
Just as in Vietnam in 1975, the withdrawl of American air support has wrecked the resistance of Afghan ground forces.
We know it isn’t possible for Joe Biden to have conceived of this policy. We need to know who has so blithely engineered this humanitarian disaster. There will be an absolute slaughter accompanied by the enslavement of Afghan women.
Millions will be driven from their homes. To whom can they turn for refuge?
More coldly, our bases may soon host Chinese, Iranian, or Pakistani forces.
This is a disaster on every level.
We went into Afghanistan because Bush refused to go after the real culprit of 9/11, Saudi Arabia. It was a mistake from day one. All of Afghanistan is not worth the life of a single US soldier. Our exit was long overdue. That being said, it was unfortunate that so many Afghans that joined us, will now be paying a heavy price. All I can say is that if any thought went into our initial invasion, it would not have happed. We also screwed up in Iraq and Libya. Our record in Egypt and Syria isn’t very good either. We keep hearing about the mistakes of Vietnam and we keep repeating them.
GERMANY will not provide any money AFGHANISTAN if the TALIBAN takes over and introduces SHARIA LAW. U.S. intelligence believes Taliban militants could take over KABUL within 90 days.
If anyone ever doubted Obamas fanatical goal of destroying the United States the present foreign policy dramatically reveals it.
The is the best summary of the disaster that is going to occur. It’s dangerous to be an ally of the U.S.!
We never had a plan to begin with. You wage war to either 1. Conquer and keep, 2. Conquer and occupy for a limited time, or 3. Conquer and leave.
We tried awful hard not to conquer, but to just barely win. And then, we tried to coax a perpetually backward country to try democracy, by writing endless checks.
And then wonder why it’s not working.
That’s a guaranteed recipe for failure. Biden’s absolute ineptness only hastens its conclusion. Even Trump could not salvage what had been done by Bush and Obama, although he most certainly would have kept the Taliban on their side of the street. But Afghanistan was not worth one American life.
The “mistake” in American foreign policy is long of tooth, and to a large part, accidental. It planted roots when the country addressed the piracy phenomena in Tripoli, the Monroe Doctrine, the imperial reach of Spain in the Caribbean, the hubris of Manifest Destiny, its reach into the Pacific, the forceful opening of Japan, the mercantilist economics with China, nation building in the Philippines, World Wars to resolve European conflicts, and concessionary military and economic aid to the open hands of willing recipients throughout the World. As a consequence, its extended hand was bitten routinely by friend and foe alike.
Afghanistan is a distillation of these tendencies. The nation failed to beware of its friends, and more so of its enemies. It has paid the price, and is continuing to pay the price, for its Quixotic foreign involvements, eschewing the advice/warning of General/President, George Washington.
It’s survival will depend on whether it can sustain the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and demonstrate its capacity to keep what Ben Franklin identified – a republic..
Let me start by disabusing those who think that the World Trade Center beam was abandoned in the rush for the exits. It was located at Fort Drum, NY.
There were many voices in the national security community that advocated against the occupation and nation-building policy undertaken in Afghanistan. Attempting to impose a strong central government ignored the Afghan culture. Further, the ambitious infrastructure policy was doomed by corruption, read any of the SIGAR reports
Afghan security forces came to depend on close air support and other technology. Afghan forces did not have the technical skills to maintain airframes, relying on Western contractors who have largely withdrawn as the Taliban has advanced.
Our reliance on the word of the Taliban political office which does not have control of Taliban fighting forces doomed the peace process from the start.
Frankly, the retrograde of Western Forces does not appear to have been well planned. An example is the abandonment of the Bagram base leaving behind containers of small arms, laptops, and other equipment reportedly in the dead of night.
When I was in Afghanistan, a Taliban leader told me that “you have the watch, we have the time”. Apparently a very accurate prediction.
The Demorats, according to my memory, established the weak-kneed and cowardly approach to foreign policy under Obama, or perhaps Jimmy Carter. The continuation of such spinelessness and abandonment of allies under Biden amid growing Demorat Communism demonstrates the U.S. withdrawal from its former role as a super-power able and willing to keep monster dictatorships (Russia, China, North Korea) afraid to go too far in defying the U.S.
Now there are threats of war with China. The Western Alliance is no more. China and Russia will rule the world, or what is left of it, once China is through with us.
Just for the historical record–Glen Greenwald, in his recent essay “The U.S. Government Lied For Two Decades About Afghanistan,” comes closest, in my opinion, to establishing the essence of American foreign policy in Afghanistan— mostly lies consistently told to the American people.
Greenwald notes that “….the U.S. had Afghanistan under every conceivable kind of electronic surveillance for more than a decade. A significant portion of the archive provided to me by Edward Snowden, detailed the extensive surveillance the NSA had imposed on all of Afghanistan. In accordance with the guidelines he required we never published most of those documents about U.S. surveillance in Afghanistan on the ground that it could endanger people without adding to the public interest…”
“…under the codename SOMALET the NSA had developed the capacity to be secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation in at least five countries–one of which was Afghanistan.”
“There was virtually nothing that could happen in Afghanistan without the U.S. intelligence community’s knowledge.”