Of Course Joe Biden’s Afghanistan Debacle Destabilized the World

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

 

The umpteenth congressional hearing on the fallout that is still settling over the geopolitical landscape following Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan proved far from useless. At the very least, it exposed administration officials’ inability to admit the extent to which that disaster destabilized the world and undermined core U.S. interests abroad.

 

Of course, congressional Democrats had a different goal in mind when they pressed Secretary of State Antony Blinken to explain why the president’s failures in Afghanistan did not contribute to the increasingly aggressive posture assumed by America’s adversaries.

 

“Just months after Afghanistan, we did face a new threat,” House Foreign Affairs Committee ranking member Gregory Meeks observed. “So, yes or no,” he asked, “do you see any connection between Putin’s reinvasion of Ukraine and the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan?”

 

“No,” Blinken replied. “On the contrary, I think our adversaries, including Russia, would have been delighted if we had doubled down and remained stuck in Afghanistan for another 20 years.”

 

It’s not at all clear why Blinken thinks Moscow regrets the geopolitical victory it helped engineer. The Kremlin had cultivated warm relations with the Taliban for years prior to America’s bug-out from Afghanistan. Moscow provided the Taliban with weapons and shared intelligence and, in contrast with American service personnel toward the end of the U.S. mission, established a visible presence in the country. It has not filled the vacuum left by the United States with Russian influence, but its operatives enjoy a freer hand in Central Asia with America gone.

 

As for the notion that the U.S. withdrawal did not embolden America’s adversaries, Blinken’s testimony conflicts with testimony by U.S. Air Force general Tod Wolters, formerly NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe. In the immediate aftermath of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, Wolters told the House Armed Services Committee that Putin was “attempting to take advantage of fissures that could have appeared in NATO as a result of the post-Afghanistan environment.”

 

Blinken’s remarks are also incompatible with former French president François Hollande’s assessment. “When the United States withdrew from Afghanistan, it showed signs of weakness, and Vladimir Putin interpreted it as a success for himself,” the onetime first secretary to France’s Socialist Party acknowledged. “Each of our withdrawals has been a new opportunity for his influence to grow.”

 

Even the Russians disagree. “Did the fact that Afghanistan having [sic] the status of a main U.S. ally outside of NATO save the ousted pro-American regime in Kabul?” Nikolai Patrushev, the former head of Russia’s national security council, asked. “A similar situation awaits those who are banking on America in Ukraine where neo-Nazis are capable of taking power, the country is going to disintegrate, and the White House at a certain moment won’t even remember its supporters in Kyiv.”

 

Patrushev’s comments may have been little more than a propagandistic flourish. As Congressman Chris Smith observed during Wednesday’s hearing, the Chinese state media, too, have made great hay of America’s withdrawal. “They’re telling the people over and over again in Taiwan that America’s resolve in Taiwan is questionable,” Smith noted. “We will leave them, too.” But the timeline of events leading up to the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which featured numerous Russian buildups and drawdowns along its eastern border prior to September and October 2021, at which point Russian logistical operations looked more like staging for a prolonged military operation, suggests otherwise.

 

Still, Blinken did his best to polish his boss’s apple. America’s deployments to Afghanistan did not deter Russia from invading Georgia in 2008, he noted. Nor did that footprint dissuade Russia from invading Crimea and the Donbas in 2014. Indeed, the U.S. withdrawal actually helped the West isolate Russia. “Because we were able to refocus our time, our resources, our efforts, we were able to build this coalition of more than 50 countries that has stood up to Russian aggression,” Blinken maintained.

 

That’s quite the compilation of non sequiturs. America’s deployments in the Global War on Terror did not detract from Washington’s ability to forcefully oppose the designs of land-hungry despots. And while Afghanistan didn’t factor into Moscow’s thinking when it invaded its near abroad in the last decade, the Atlantic Alliance decision to put Georgia’s NATO accession plan on indefinite hold just four months before that incursion probably did. Likewise, Barack Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 and his craven efforts to preserve that campaign trail promise (up to and including allowing Russia to prosecute his self-set “red line” in Syria) surely contributed to the impression in the Kremlin that the U.S. was in retreat.

 

Americans may be relieved to have washed their hands of Afghanistan, even if they would have preferred an immaculate evacuation. But that was never going to be a cost-free endeavor. America’s enemies take their cues from our actions and inaction. Blinken may be loath to acknowledge that intuitive reality, but the public likely understands that displays of American weakness invite tests of American resolve.