From Moral Responsibility to Magical Thinking: How Biden Changed His Mind
on Afghanistan
After
9/11, Biden embraced the idea that U.S. troops should leave the country better
than how they found it. Now, as president, he’s withdrawing them regardless.
APRIL 16,
2021, 5:13 PM
Then-U.S.
Vice President Joe Biden arrives at a U.S. base in Maidan Shar, Wardak
Province, Afghanistan, on Jan. 11, 2011. SHAH MARAI/AFP VIA GETTY
IMAGES
I. “I could
tell he was thinking of his own granddaughters.”
Then-U.S. Sen. Joe Biden shares a moment with a
student at Aryana Afghan-Turk High School during his visit to Kabul,
Afghanistan, on Jan. 12, 2002.PAULA BRONSTEIN/ GETTY IMAGES
U.S.
President Joe Biden was once committed to helping Afghanistan get back on its
feet—and in the early days, he thought former U.S. President George W. Bush was
too. In November 2001, Biden, then-chairperson of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, was sitting in the Oval Office listening to Bush talk
enthusiastically about an idea he had once denigrated: nation-building.
The Taliban
were on the run, hammered relentlessly by U.S. bombs, and the brief war known
as “Operation Enduring Freedom” was all but won after only a month. The subject
of discussion was what would happen to Afghanistan afterward. Biden nodded
approvingly as Bush insisted this wasn’t going to be like 1989, when the United
States discarded the country like a used cartridge after years of supplying the
mujahedeen in their successful war against the Soviets, opening the way to
Taliban rule.
Biden
endorsed this idea: This time, the United States needed to stay. The president
was “going on about the long-term commitment we have to make,” Biden recalled
in an interview with me on Dec. 20, 2001. “I said, ‘Mr. President, it’s going
to cost billions of dollars. I think we’re going to have to have a multilateral
force in there.’ And I think he and I are mostly in agreement.”
In truth,
they weren’t. In the months that followed, Biden found himself increasingly
dismayed by Bush’s swift turn toward Iraq and neglect of Afghanistan, according
to former aides. Biden, by most accounts, was emotionally invested in
Afghanistan at the time. In January 2002, he became the first U.S. member of
Congress to visit Kabul. He was taken to a new girls’ school, an experience
that moved him immensely since such schools had been banned under Taliban rule,
said former U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who accompanied him on that visit.
Added Biden’s former Senate spokesperson Norm Kurz, who was also on the trip,
“I could tell he was thinking of his own young granddaughters.”
In the early
2000s, Biden tried to persuade then-U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to
do more to bring Afghanistan into the modern world. But Rumsfeld insisted on a
“small footprint” and occasional counterterrorism strikes from the air that
cynics called “whack-a-mole” tactics. Rumsfeld simply wouldn’t listen to
Biden’s arguments for stepping up aid and a U.S. troop presence, Kurz recalled.
“He had been
very much of the view that you shouldn’t go in and just kill people and leave,”
said Jonah Blank, another former Biden aide who accompanied him on that trip as
the senator’s Afghanistan expert. “He felt in both moral and geopolitical terms
that if you are invading a country, intervening militarily, then you do have a
responsibility to leave it better than you found it.”
But as
Washington turned its attention to Iraq—and Biden eventually became one of
those who authorized that war—things began to go seriously wrong in
Afghanistan. The Taliban crept back from the mountains and formed the Quetta
Shura, the Taliban leaders’ council across the border in Pakistan. By 2004,
when the Taliban insurgency began again in earnest, the United States was entirely
consumed with its own insurgency in Iraq. Today, things are completely out of
hand. Funded by opium sales and the Pakistani intelligence service, the
resurgent Taliban are believed to exert influence or control over at least half
the country. They are able to strike freely even in the Afghan capital, Kabul,
especially since the militant group has deeply infiltrated the demoralized
Afghan national security forces.
II. “You
don’t end a war by withdrawing your forces.”
Then-Vice President Joe Biden speaks with U.S. troops
at a base in Maidan Shar, Wardak Province, Afghanistan, on Jan. 11, 2011.SHAH MARAI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Now a
disillusioned Biden has adopted a very different point of view—circling back
around to an approach that appears uncomfortably similar to Bush’s and
Rumsfeld’s. This week, Biden announced that all U.S. forces would withdraw by
the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. NATO immediately followed Biden’s
lead on Wednesday, saying its roughly 7,000 non-U.S. forces in Afghanistan
would be departing within a few months.
“I’m now the
fourth United States president to preside over American troop presence in
Afghanistan; two Republicans, two Democrats. I will not pass this
responsibility onto a fifth,” Biden said in a speech from the White House on Wednesday.
“Our diplomatic and humanitarian work will continue,” he added, without being
specific.
But no one
has any illusions about what is certain to be at least a partial return of
Taliban power, even though Biden sent U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to
Afghanistan the day after his speech to pledge the United States’ “ongoing commitment” to the elected Afghan
government. The first to suffer could well be girls and women, who the Taliban,
in their past incarnation in power from 1996 to 2001, kept out of school and
public sight. Women were also forced to wear burqas, an all-encompassing
garment that hides even their faces.
Some inside
the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community fear a premature declaration of
success and a too-rapid withdrawal could open Biden to the same criticisms that
former U.S. President Barack Obama suffered when he pulled out of Iraq in 2011
(on Biden’s advice), only to see the Islamic State fill the vacuum. Others fear
that Biden’s decision could potentially leave the United States in a place
similar to where it was pre-9/11: facing a Taliban-dominated host nation for al
Qaeda. Despite its promises otherwise, many experts believe the Taliban
continue to nurture a close relationship with what remains of the terrorist
group.
Crocker, who
twice served as ambassador to Afghanistan, said he thinks the usually
clear-eyed Biden is engaged in “magical thinking” about Afghanistan—especially
if he believes Washington has any leverage left with the Taliban.
For
starters, the Afghan peace talks are now doomed, Crocker said, who retired
recently as one of the United States’ most esteemed diplomats. “The Taliban
have no incentive whatsoever to negotiate anything,” he said. Turkey announced
earlier this week that representatives of both the Afghan government and the
Taliban would continue talks in Istanbul later this month, but Blinken
acknowledged Thursday there was as yet no “definitive” response from the
Taliban about their participation. And on Wednesday, Biden’s own CIA director,
William Burns, told Congress “when the time comes for the U.S. military to
withdraw, the U.S. government’s ability to collect and act on threats will
diminish. That’s simply a fact.”
“I think Biden is going to look back
and regret he made that decision and that speech,” Crocker said. “You don’t end
a war by withdrawing your forces. The war grinds on without you.”
III. “This
dinner is over.”
Then-U.S. Sen. Joe Biden talks with then-Afghan
President Hamid Karzai during a meeting at the Presidential Palace in Kabul on
Feb. 20, 2008.MASSOUD HOSSAINI/AFP VIA
GETTY IMAGES
What changed
for Biden? By the accounts of several people who know the president well, he is
at the tail end of a long period of deepening disillusionment with Afghanistan,
a process that started with the Afghan leader that Washington installed in the
early 2000s, Hamid Karzai.
Over time,
Biden came to believe that because of endemic corruption, the United States was
throwing billions of dollars—and nearly 2,500 U.S. lives lost along with more
than 20,000 wounded—into a nation that was irremediably backward and broken,
ruled by medieval warlords and fundamentalist sensibilities. On Friday, Brown
University’s Costs of War project reported the war has
cost $2.26 trillion in all since the United States invaded on Oct. 7, 2001.
According to a report last fall by the Special Inspector General for
Afghanistan Reconstruction, “waste, fraud, and abuse” has cost the United
States at least $19 billion in reconstruction money—about
30 percent of the amount invested and reviewed by Congress—in Afghanistan since
2002.
“I think it
was a gradual process between 2002 and 2009,” Blank said, “as it became more
clear that Karzai wasn’t providing the civilian leadership. Biden’s distaste
boiled up by 2008 and 2009.”
In February
2008, Biden traveled again to Afghanistan along with his close Senate
colleagues John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, and they were invited to dinner with
Karzai at his palace. The three Senate heavyweights wanted to address the
corruption in Karzai’s government, including runaway graft and alleged
narcotics connections. After Karzai denied such problems existed, an enraged
Biden threw down his napkin, slammed the table with his hand, and walked out,
declaring, “This dinner is over.”
“The big
rupture for him came in January 2009. That was when he took his only trip as
vice president elect,” Blank said. Convinced that stabilizing Afghanistan was
hopeless, Biden became the lone senior official to argue early in the Obama
administration that another troop “surge” would be a waste. As Obama wrote in
his recent memoir, A Promised Land, Biden expressed little faith in
the Afghan government’s reliability under Karzai and later, current President
Ashraf Ghani.
“Whatever
the mix of reasons, he saw Afghanistan as a dangerous quagmire and urged me to
delay a deployment,” Obama wrote. Biden lost that debate initially: Obama
raised U.S. troop levels to nearly 100,000 troops. But then, Obama began
dramatically cutting back in his second term as the Pentagon’s
counterinsurgency strategy—winning over hearts and minds with humanitarian aid
and a multibillion-dollar military policy to “clear, hold, and build” cities
and towns—failed badly in most parts of the country, appearing to vindicate
Biden’s skeptical counsel.
Even before
he became vice president, Biden was pushing Obama toward defining an
“endpoint.” At a hearing with the then-Iraq commander, Gen. David Petraeus, in
the spring of 2008, Biden counseled Obama to lower expectations for what Iraq
might look like after the U.S. withdrawal—and that approach later shaped both
of their approaches to Afghanistan. Obama, a freshman senator who was by then a
presidential candidate, earned media praise by telling Petraeus: “When you have
finite resources, you’ve got to define your goals tightly and modestly. I’m not
suggesting that we yank all our troops out all the way. I’m trying to get to an
endpoint.” Biden later told me the language used by Obama was written, behind
the scenes, by him: “He asked for my advice,” Biden explained.
Biden also
became leery of the endless arguments from the Pentagon about waiting for the
proper “conditions” before withdrawing. As the president suggested in his
speech Wednesday, he has simply been listening for too many years to the same
talk. Biden noted that in 2014, NATO issued a declaration affirming Afghan
security forces would take responsibility for the country’s security by the end
of that year. That didn’t really happen either; U.S. special operations and
NATO forces, even while they were nominally “advising” the Afghan forces, often
found themselves leading the fight.
“So when
will it be the right moment to leave?” Biden asked. “One more year? Two more
years? Ten more years? Ten, 20, $30 billion more on the trillion we’ve already
spent? Not now? That’s how we got here.”
…
Blank said
even in the early days, Biden saw there would be a need for a hard-headed
counterterrorism approach alongside school openings. “He was not of the
neoconservative school,” Blank said. “He never thought we would have to stay
there 20 years and that unless we created a little America, then we haven’t
done our job.”
Once he
became president, Biden swiftly signaled his intentions when he kept on former
U.S. President Donald Trump’s envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad. Last year, Khalilzad
negotiated a controversial agreement with the Taliban: U.S. troops would leave
by May 1 in exchange for the Taliban’s commitment to disavow al Qaeda and enter into peace talks with an Afghan
delegation. The Taliban have largely failed to follow through on these
promises, though Biden says the U.S. withdrawal will begin on May 1 anyway. In
the early weeks of Biden’s presidency, Crocker and others said it appeared an
internal debate was underway about whether to embrace the pact. Before Blinken
was confirmed by the Senate, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called his
counterpart in Kabul, Afghan National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib,
reaffirming Biden’s intent to work with the Afghan government and “review”
Khalilzad’s deal.
That
position appeared to shift after Blinken—who has been with Biden all along on
his Afghanistan odyssey since his time as staff director of the Foreign
Relations Committee—came on board. Last month, Blinken sent a rather
undiplomatic and peremptory letter to Ghani, reelected in 2019, suggesting he
share power with the Taliban in a “new, inclusive” government. The letter
itself was a striking breach of protocol since, as secretary of state, Blinken
is not supposed to be addressing a head of state as an equal.
In his
speech this week, Biden acknowledged the second-guessers. “I know there are
many who will loudly insist that diplomacy cannot succeed without a robust U.S.
military presence to stand as leverage,” he said. “We gave that argument a
decade. It’s never proved effective, not when we had 98,000 troops in
Afghanistan and not when we were down to a few thousand.”
Biden’s
announcement could also accelerate the end of “forever wars” against other
terrorist groups around the world like the Islamic State if they are no longer deemed to pose a strategic
threat to the United States. In his speech, the president cited the rise of new
challenges such as China and global health, saying, “We’ll be much more
formidable to our adversaries and competitors over the long term if we fight
the battles for the next 20 years, not the last 20.”
In the end,
Biden said, his decision was about ending the needless sacrifice of young
Americans like his late son Beau, who served in Iraq and whom he mentioned in
his speech.
“War in
Afghanistan was never meant to be a multigenerational undertaking,” he said.
“We were attacked. We went to war with clear goals. We achieved those
objectives. [Osama] Bin Laden is dead and al Qaeda is degraded in Afghanistan.
And it’s time to end the forever war.”
READ MORE
Biden’s
Withdrawal Plan Sets the Clock Ticking in Afghanistan
With troops to depart
on Sept. 11, the next five months are critical for any chance of peace.
ARGUMENT |
Biden Just Made
a Historic Break With the Logic of Forever War
But will he really end
the United States’ other open-ended conflicts?
ARGUMENT |
Biden Team
Engaged in ‘Rigorous’ Debate Over Ending Forever War
With the 20th
anniversary of 9/11 approaching, the president wants to declare success. But
military and CIA careerists are said to be resisting.
REPORT |
Michael Hirsh is a senior correspondent and
deputy news editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @michaelphirsh
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