The Biden Administration’s Afghanistan Revisionism Exposed

By Noah Rothman

Monday, September 09, 2024

 

Democrats can blame Trump all they like, but it was Biden who presided over the bloody embarrassment of America’s withdrawal from Central Asia.

 

In the months leading up to Joe Biden’s catastrophically botched withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the president and his subordinates insisted that their hands were tied. It was Donald Trump, after all, who negotiated an agreement with the Taliban that simply had to culminate in an American pullout from Central Asia. That line became even more central to the Democratic Party’s talking points after the withdrawal devolved into a bloody national humiliation. Somehow, it was all Trump’s fault.

 

“It is perhaps not what I would have negotiated myself, but it was an agreement made by the United States government, and that means something,” Biden said on April 14, 2021, in defense of his stubborn devotion to the terms scratched out by his predecessor. As the American position in Afghanistan imploded, Biden leaned hard into the notion that he had been shackled to a bad deal. “I had only one alternative,” Biden said in the immediate aftermath of the Abbey Gate massacre: “to send thousands more troops back into Afghanistan to fight a war that we had already won, relative to the reason why we went in the first place.” Biden’s allies wielded the deal the Trump administration produced with the Taliban in Doha like a “get out of jail free” card whenever their wisdom came into question. And by the third year of Biden’s term, Trump’s responsibility for the mess the administration engineered in Afghanistan had become an inviolable tenet of the faith. “President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor,” a 2023 Biden administration summary of the withdrawal read.

 

This exercise in blame-shifting was crudely constructed from the outset. Even before 13 American soldiers were killed in a preventable disaster outside Kabul’s civilian airport, the Biden administration’s excuses for its failures strained credulity.

 

The Doha Agreement was conditional, defenders of Trump’s role in negotiations with the Taliban rightly insist. Biden inherited no plan to withdraw U.S. forces prior to the exfiltration of American civilians and U.S. allies, no proposal compelling America to surrender Bagram Airbase before withdrawal was complete, and no requirement compelling the State Department to abruptly shutter diplomatic facilities in the country despite assurances that they would remain open. The president routinely cited warnings related to him by, among others, America’s lead negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, who insisted that blowing past a tentative May 1, 2021, withdrawal deadline would result in renewed Taliban attacks on U.S. outposts. But blow through it Biden did, settling first on 9/11 as his preferred withdrawal date before retreating to August 31. As the American position in Afghanistan deteriorated, the U.S. did resume airstrikes on Taliban forces in late July of that year and Biden did order the deployment of more American troops to Afghanistan to cover the U.S. withdrawal.

 

Biden had so amended the Doha deal’s terms that casual observers could reasonably conclude he owned the tragedy in Afghanistan regardless of the framework he inherited from Trump. Today, following a years-long investigation led by Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, a report itemizing the failures that produced the Afghan debacle reveals just how little regard the Biden administration had for the Doha Agreement they so often cite.

 

“The president decided we’re gonna leave, and he’s not listening to anybody,” said Colonel Seth Krummrich, chief of staff for Special Operations Command Central, in the midst of the withdrawal. That assessment is consistent with the president’s behavior in advance of retrograde operations. The report paints a portrait of a White House that was so invested in leaving Afghanistan come what may that the president’s exposure to contrary opinions was severely limited.

 

The report suggests the administration’s interagency review of the Doha Agreement was a cursory exercise, and key figures such as Biden’s Afghan ambassador and General Scott Miller, the commander of NATO’s Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan, were barely consulted. Administration figures who did warn Biden of the threats posed to U.S. national security and ordinary Afghans by a Taliban restoration were blown off. Withdrawal was the course of action on which this administration was set, regardless of the terms of the Doha Agreement.

 

“Notably, former Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Afghanistan throughout 2021, Mr. Mark Evans, explained to the committee President Biden’s decision to unconditionally withdraw all U.S. troops was in fact not contingent on compliance to the Doha Agreement’s conditions,” committee chairman Mike McCaul’s account read, “asserting there was no ‘checklist approach’ where the U.S. would refuse to uphold its end of the deal until the Taliban held up theirs.” Indeed, the acting assistant secretary for the region, Dean Thompson, “could not recall if his bureau ever offered an assessment of whether the Taliban was meeting their commitments under the Doha Agreement.”

 

The document even alleges that the “Biden-Harris administration withheld material information from the American people” about the Taliban’s failure to meet the conditions established in the Doha framework. In the lead-up to departure, State Department spokesman Ned Price promised to conduct a review of the Taliban’s adherence to its commitments. But that was a mere box-checking exercise. “In his testimony before the committee, contrary to his public statement, Mr. Price asserted the Taliban’s adherence to the Doha Agreement was in fact ‘immaterial’ to the Biden-Harris administration’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan,” the report read.

 

Don’t expect this information to deter Democrats from broadcasting the notion that Trump was the true author of America’s national humiliation in Afghanistan. As Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee insist in their response to the McCaul report, Trump committed “the United States to a full, date-specific withdrawal in a deal he negotiated with the Taliban” and “initiated a withdrawal that was irreversible without sending significantly more American troops to Afghanistan to face renewed combat with the Taliban.” Disaster was inevitable, Democrats maintain; the only open question was which president would preside over it.

 

But the Republican investigation has concluded that Biden entered office hell-bent on taking the U.S. out of the fight in Central Asia, whatever the cost to its allies or America’s strategic position in the region. This administration’s commitment to retreat was unconditional. Democrats can blame Trump all they like for staking out an Afghan policy that put America on the path to a bloody national embarrassment, but it was Biden who presided over that embarrassment. The result was an indelible stain on his legacy.