The fall of the US-backed government in Afghanistan at the hands of the Taliban was faster than almost anyone in Washington or Kabul could have imagined.
By Sunday afternoon, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had fled his country, the Taliban were once again on the verge of running the country, and President Biden called for sending thousands of additional troops to safely evacuate US diplomatic personnel and others from Kabul. authorized for .
It is a surprising turn of events, taking place just weeks before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that accelerated the US invasion of Afghanistan. And it adds another issue to mounting Republican attacks against Biden a year before Congressional Democrats with a weakening grip on power in Washington stood up for reelection.
After years of inaction under the Trump presidency, the Republican hawks are once again circling.
Censors Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Tom Cotton, R-Ark. said the Biden administration had been warned that things would get so bad. Cotton said the withdrawal "humiliated America." Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., alleges that Biden "turned his back on our allies."
When the Biden Administration announced their Afghanistan pullout plan, several of us on the Intel Committee told them their predictions of what would happen next were complete fantasy.
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) August 15, 2021
We are now witnessing how true our warnings to them were.
A long, difficult history
The complete withdrawal of the US military from an unpopular war, America's longest, in a country that has killed more than 172,000 people, including thousands of American service members, and cost $1 trillion, was always going to be messy. - and a blow to American pride.
Critics are out in full force, comparing it to the fall of Saigon after the conflict in Vietnam or the killing of Serebrenica in the Balkans in the 1990s.
But Afghanistan has long had its own unique enigma.
This is a country in which other powerful outside nations have failed before. Its infrastructure and economy have long been in shambles, due in no small part to rampant corruption in the US-backed government. And when the U.S. pursued the Taliban, gaining the confidence of the local population, some of whom joined the U.S. viewed as foreign invaders, was always going to be difficult.
This is especially true because 90% of the world's heroin comes from poppy seeds grown in Afghanistan. Farmers felt pressured to continue to grow the crop, and seeing no economic alternative to opium – and no guarantee of long-term protection from the US military or the Kabul government – many made the difficult choice to continue doing so.
Fight till the end
Its inability to foster sustainable economic growth and prosperity has long been debated about what the US mission in Afghanistan was, especially after the assassination of Osama bin Laden a decade earlier.
Bin Laden was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. The Taliban had given him safe haven, and he recruited and trained fighters in Afghanistan.
How to end the war has been a puzzle for US presidents.
George W Bush largely abandoned Afghanistan and instead turned to a futile and costly effort of regime change and then nation-building in Iraq.
Barack Obama refocused on Afghanistan and what he thought was the main mission - to find and kill bin Laden. But from the very beginning of his presidency, Obama felt pressure from the Pentagon not to exit the country completely. He began a drawdown after the assassination of bin Laden, but never gave up completely.
Continuous U.S. in the country The appearance became unpopular with Americans, including many Republicans. Neo-conservative hawks took a back seat to the Tea Party's domestic-focused populism, which former President Donald Trump took at the helm of the GOP.
Trump rejected his party's conservatism, seeing the national-security hawk leg of the three-legged Republican stool, which had been steadfast since President Ronald Reagan led the party, and that he made a comeback with the Taliban. laid the foundation of what was believed. There was talk of inviting him to sign an agreement at Camp David last year to pull out American troops by May 1.
Trump now criticized the way Biden withdrew forces. Biden will own up to the consequences of the comeback, but Trump's status as the most popular figure in his party puts the GOP hawks in a difficult spot, too.
Biden had always been to a limited footprint in Afghanistan, dating back to his days as vice president. During the Obama administration, he argued for a significant decline, but still retained the ability of special forces to launch counter-terrorist operations.
It has been less of a focus for Biden as president, suggesting it is over and done with.
Biden said in April, "I believed that our presence in Afghanistan should be focused on why we went there in the first place - to make sure Afghanistan doesn't attack our homeland again." will not be used as a basis." "We did that. We served that purpose."
On Saturday, Biden said in a statement, "I have ordered our armed forces and our intelligence community to ensure that we maintain the capacity and vigilance to deal with future terrorist threats from Afghanistan."
How this will happen is unclear, although Secretary of State Tony Blinken told NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday that the US is now more capable of launching counterterrorism attacks than it was before 9/11.
"We are in a much different and better place than we were right before 9/11," Blinken said. "The group that attacked us has decreased dramatically. The ability to re-attack us from Afghanistan has decreased dramatically. Our ability to see this and our ability to do something about it has been greatly reduced." Strong. And so in that sense, I think we're in a much better place than we were 20 years ago."
Political pressure and a debate that will likely continue for generations
America certainly doesn't have the same peace and prosperity that it did in the 1990s, but there are some, especially those aligned with the military, who argue that America should live longer. Because without America there, the inevitable happened.
The Taliban wrested control from a pro-Western government, and there are fears that since the Taliban once covered al Qaeda, that the country would have a strong U.S. Without presence terrorist cells can grow again.
That narrative is a popular one, particularly in the Washington media echo chamber, which is often criticized for being pro-military. Others believe this to be wrong, and that living in Afghanistan, perhaps forever, would be an act of folly.
"Even though ugly, Biden understood the reality of the situation better than his military advisers," writes Josh Marshall, left-wing author of the Talking Points memo, "after 20 years it was up to the Afghans to decide their own future." . This is a fight for the Afghans, not the second generation of American boys. A permanent deployment was not in the security interests of the United States."
That's exactly the argument the Biden administration is making.
"Twenty years, $1 trillion, the 2,300 Americans who lost their lives, a huge investment," Blinken said on Meet the Press Sunday. "And the president concluded that it was time to end this war."
He said the US has been in Afghanistan twice as long as the British in the 19th century and more than twice as long as the Russians in the 20th century.
"As a strategic matter," Blinken said, "there is nothing that makes our strategic competitors want to see that we are stuck in Afghanistan for the next five, 10, 20 years. It's not in the national interest." Is."
What is clear now is whether or not leaving Afghanistan is in the national interest, is that, a year before the first midterm election of his presidency, which has been historically merciless for the party in power, there has been a whole slew of attacks against Biden. The plate is him and his party, foreign and domestic - from Afghanistan, to the resurgent coronavirus pandemic, to the precarious economy, crime and immigration - that he has to contend with.