Biden’s Afghan Gamble
April 27, 2021
Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for Middle East Policy, Center for Security, Strategy,
and Technology
Director - The Intelligence Project
President Biden has made a big decision on
Afghanistan, with significant risks. After much consideration, I believe he has
done the right thing — but it’s a big gamble. It will have particularly serious
consequences for Pakistani behavior.
A LONG HISTORY
I have been involved in U.S. policy vis-à-vis the wars
in Afghanistan since Christmas Eve 1979, when I was in the Central Intelligence
Agency’s (CIA) operations center as the Russians invaded the country. The
National Security Agency reported detecting 300 Russian flights that day from
Soviet bases in Central Asia to Kabul, air-lifting an elite airborne division
to the capital.
Washington was taken by surprise, but in
less than a month President Jimmy Carter put together a strategy and an
alliance with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviets that went on to
win the final and decisive battle of the Cold War. Two weeks after the
invasion, the CIA shipped the first weapons to Karachi for the mujaheddin.
We have made many mistakes in Afghanistan. We paid
almost no attention to the country after the Soviets left, and it descended
into a failed state that was misruled by the Taliban and hosted al-Qaida.
President George W. Bush took his eye off the ball after the invasion in 2001
and let Osama bin Laden escape into Pakistan. By 2005, he was encased in his
hideout in Abbottabad. With America bogged down in Iraq, al-Qaida regenerated.
By 2006, it was more dangerous than ever. The British
foiled an al-Qaida plot that summer to simultaneously blow up a half-dozen
airplanes en route from the United Kingdom to America and Canada over the
Atlantic Ocean. Bin Laden had directed the plot from his hideout and used
Pakistanis living in England as suicide bombers. It would have been worse than
9/11.
President Barack Obama’s so-called AfPak
report in March 2009 identified the principal goal of America’s
policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan to be “to disrupt, dismantle and defeat
al-Qaida.” It recognized that it was Pakistan where al-Qaida was most
entrenched. Obama ordered the CIA to ruthlessly destroy the organization with
drones based in Afghanistan, operating across the border.
Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, President Barack Obama, Senior
Advisor Bruce Riedel, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the public
rollout of the president’s Afghanistan-Pakistan policy in March 2009. Source:
The author’s collection.
He also ordered a full-scale hunt for bin Laden. In
2009, the search was stone-cold: The CIA had no idea where he was. After
brilliant analysis, he was located less than a mile from Pakistan’s top
military academy. Ten years ago — on May 2, 2011 — the Navy SEALs delivered
justice. Al-Qaida has never recovered. It is still present in the region but it
has been decimated and defeated. Last September, Ayman al-Zawahri — bin Laden’s
successor — issued a statement on the anniversary of 9/11. No one noticed. It
was a sign of how marginalized the group has become.
AL-QAIDA, THE TALIBAN, AND CIVIL WAR
Of course, the United States is also fighting in the
Afghan civil war that escalated when the Russians left Kabul in 1989. The war
against the Taliban is impossible to win as long as Pakistan provides sanctuary
and safety, training, equipment, and funds for the Taliban. We cannot defeat
Pakistan, which is a nuclear-armed state and has the fifth largest population
in the world. As Obama wrote in his memoir “A Promised Land”: “The Riedel
report made one thing clear: Unless Pakistan stopped sheltering the Taliban,
our efforts at long term stability in Afghanistan were bound to fail.”
Our troops accomplished the top priority in 2011 by
killing bin Laden. They cannot defeat the proxy army of the Rawalpindi
generals. It is that reality that underscores Biden’s decision.
Unfortunately, our intelligence capabilities will be
hurt without a military presence in the country; that is part of the gamble
Biden has chosen. If al-Qaida does regenerate and plots an attack on the U.S.,
the intelligence community will have less capacity to uncover the plot and to
block it. It’s a big gamble.
Related Books
·
By Madiha Afzal
2018
·
By Bruce Riedel
2019
·
By Bruce Riedel
2019
Moreover, Biden inherited a terrible deal from Trump’s
feckless negotiators: a May 1, 2021 deadline to get out of
Afghanistan or face renewed attacks on the more than 10,000 American and NATO
troops. In return, the Taliban was to renounce al-Qaida and sever ties to the
group. It did neither, but it has largely refrained from attacking American
troops for the last year. Biden knew that if he ignored the May deadline, the
Taliban would resume attacks on foreign forces. Indeed, they would be prime
targets. He is gambling that the Taliban will accept his new timeline to
withdraw by this September.
What happens next is unclear. The civil war will
certainly escalate further. The Taliban will have little or no interest in the
political process with the government in Kabul, but they have never been
interested in it nor have they ever lived up to the obligations in the
agreement with Trump. Whether the Taliban will keep from disrupting the NATO
withdrawal is unclear.
The victory of the Taliban in
Afghanistan is not inevitable. The Communist government in Kabul survived for
three years after the Red Army left. It only collapsed when its top military
commander, Abdul Rashid Dostam, defected to the side of the mujaheddin. He still runs his
home province Jowzjan in the north. I have a lovely carpet from Dostam, when we
met in the Pentagon; he is also a unrepentant gangster.
The Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazari groups do not want to
be governed by the Pashtun Taliban. Urban Afghans don’t want the medieval
Islamic Emirate. Nearly three-quarters of Afghans are under 30 years old and
have lived their lives in a relatively open society. The civil war will go on,
most likely, with the Taliban seizing some cities in the south. We should
continue to fund the Afghan army, as Biden has promised.
We should be proud of the very significant changes the
last 20 years have brought to Afghanistan, especially for its women. They go to
school now, they have jobs and opportunities that had been denied by the
Taliban. The notion that the Taliban have mellowed in the last 20 years, or
that they crave international recognition, is delusional.
THE PAKISTAN PIECE
Pakistan is a winner again in Afghanistan. It has now
outlasted two superpowers. The Pakistani army generals will be more hubristic
and dangerous than ever. The army intelligence service known as the ISI
(Inter-Services Intelligence) will be the one of the most dangerous patrons of
terror in the world, especially with the Haqqani network.
Pakistan does not control the Taliban and it will
suffer negative as well as positive consequences from their improved position.
The Pakistan Taliban will be stronger and more inclined to strike inside
Pakistan. The Afghan Taliban will become more independent.
We will need a coherent strategy to deal
with Pakistan. Biden has so far failed to engage with Prime Minister Imran
Khan, as my colleague Madiha Afzal has
written. Only
belatedly was Pakistan invited to the virtual climate change
conference. Ignoring Pakistan is a mistake. It is not too late to repair. There
is no simple way to change Pakistani behavior especially given its strong
alliance with China. But engagement is better than isolation and sanctions.
The president should follow up the Afghan decision
with the withdrawal of American combat troops from Saudi Arabia and a modest
drawdown of forces elsewhere in the Gulf. The current force dispositions in
Kuwait and other Gulf states are relics of our previous wars in Iraq and are no
longer necessary. The militarization of American policy in the region needs to
be reversed.
The NATO alliance will also need attention.
Afghanistan is the alliance’s first significant out-of-area operation. Allies
labored hard to support expeditionary forces in Central Asia. Some, like
Canada, sustained heavy casualties. The perception of failure in Afghanistan
will weigh heavily on future challenges and opportunities for the alliance.
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