Biden’s Rush to the Afghan Exits The Taliban says get out by Aug. 31. The U.S. President agrees.
Some readers were upset by our editorial last week: “Biden to Afghanistan: Drop Dead.” But that headline looks more sadly accurate than ever after President Biden’s decision Tuesday to stick to his arbitrary Aug. 31 deadline for withdrawing all U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
Unless you’re Nancy Pelosi or a media partisan, there’s no sugarcoating what this means. Mr. Biden is bowing to Taliban demands, reiterated on Tuesday, not to extend the deadline. He is rejecting the advice of such G-7 leaders as Britain’s Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron of France to stay longer to get more people out of the country safely. And he is abandoning thousands of Afghans who fought with the U.S. and NATO to the Taliban’s brand of retribution.
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There was an alternative. Mr. Biden could have sent in enough military force to provide safe zones and retrieve stranded Americans and Afghan allies. He could have done so with a NATO coalition of the willing. The U.S. Army has 31 active duty combat brigades of several thousand soldiers each.
He could have told the Taliban that the U.S. is not negotiating over the deadline and that U.S. forces will remain for as long as it takes to complete the mission of rescuing our people. This would have salvaged some honor and credibility from the botched withdrawal.
Instead Mr. Biden has negotiated with the Taliban from a position of weakness. He has sent too few troops to protect the Kabul airport and retrieve our allies. He sent his CIA director to negotiate with the Taliban, who adopted Mr. Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline as their own and rejected William Burns’s entreaties.
On Tuesday the Taliban escalated by barring Afghans from even going to the airport. “We are not in favor of allowing Afghans to leave,” said Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid. Yet in his remarks Tuesday at the White House, Mr. Biden raised no objection to this command that could strand thousands of Afghan allies.
The White House and Pentagon say they don’t even know how many Americans are still in Afghanistan. As for the Afghans, James Miervaldis of the nonprofit No One Left Behind tells us via email that “we’ve got a list of 1,200 families (approx 6,000 people) who have their visas in hand. Really curious how the President is going to get them inside the airport and fly out before 8/31.”
Mr. Biden said he has asked the Pentagon and State Department to come up with “contingency plans” in case the Aug. 31 deadline can’t be met. But that sounds like political cover to make it seem that he isn’t dancing to the Taliban deadline. Media reports say some U.S. troops have already begun to depart the airport, and they will soon have to begin leaving by the hundreds to meet next Tuesday’s deadline—even as they try to provide security and assist with evacuations.
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It’s hard not to conclude that Mr. Biden’s decisions here are driven by domestic politics and the need to vindicate his initial decision to withdraw so recklessly. He wants out of Afghanistan fast, and sending more troops or ignoring the deadline would raise the risk of a confrontation with the Taliban and perhaps casualties. As long as most U.S. citizens get out, and there are no American hostages, he figures most Americans will quickly forget about the chaos at the airport and the Afghans left behind.
The White House is already spinning the evacuation as a triumph of planning and brilliant execution. They say they always knew withdrawal would be messy. They claim to have had a contingency plan, and as of Tuesday no one had died in the evacuation. That ignores the seven Afghans at the airport this week and the two who leapt to their deaths from a C-17 last week.
But never mind. As the political spin picks up speed, Mr. Biden’s panicked evacuation from Kabul will soon be compared on MSNBC to the Berlin Airlift.
We certainly hope the evacuation continues without incident. But if that happens it will be owing to good luck or because God looks kindly on fools, drunkards and the United States of America, as Bismarck famously put it.
The Afghan withdrawal is one of the sorriest American failures in decades. Its consequences will play out for years, if not decades, as friends and foes recalibrate their views of U.S. political will in general, and Mr. Biden’s in particular. The President may want Americans to forget the last two weeks, but the world will remember. The Taliban and al Qaeda will use it as a recruiting ad for young jihadists. China, Russia and Iran are already considering how they can exploit a weak America.
Mr. Biden’s bloody-minded refusal to adapt to the collapse of the Afghan government and military is another reminder that electing a U.S. President is a fateful choice. Character matters, but character has many parts. One is judgment, and another is the courage to admit a mistake and regroup. Mr. Biden is failing on both counts. With three-and-a-half years to go in his Presidency, the world is going to become much more dangerous.
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