ُThe speed of the Taliban’s advance, culminating in Sunday’s capture of Kabul, has been widely put forward as proof that Joe Biden was wrong: that his decision to end the 20 year-old Afghan mission was a historic mistake that will blight his presidency. For all that, as he himself has said, he was the fourth president to preside over the war and he would not hand it over to a fifth, he could go down only as the president who lost Afghanistan.
Maybe. But is this really how the United States — and allied — flight from Afghanistan will be seen with the benefit of even a little hindsight? Much, of course, depends on what happens next. How much bloodshed accompanies the Taliban takeover. Whether and how they will impose Sharia law as they did before, what happens to women working and girls’ education, whether and how far they will take revenge on those who served the US-backed regime. It hardly needs to be said that their word, in pledging to do none of these things, is unlikely to be their bond.
It has also to be said that the practice, if not the principle, of the withdrawal has left the United States and the UK as its chief ally looking catastrophically ill-informed and poorly prepared. The plan was to withdraw troops and dismantle all the allied military installations in good time for 9/11, and that, so far as can be judged, is pretty much what happened. Bagram air base was vacated and locked up by in early July.
The speed with which projections over the Taliban’s advance on Kabul changed however suggests a lack of reliable information that will demand an exhaustive inquest. Despite a 20-year presence in Afghanistan, supported by a massive intelligence and logistical effort, what had been intended as a measured withdrawal became a humiliating Saigon-style flight. Whatever advice Biden received on this score appears to have been spectacularly wrong.
The rushed, and at times chaotic, nature of the departure however should not be used as a reason for rejecting the actual decision to withdraw. The two things are different. And the question here — that may be disputed for a long time to come — is whether it was Biden’s decision to withdraw that made the Afghan situation unwinnable, or whether, as Andrew Watkins of the International Crisis Group argues, ‘the withdrawal decision was made because in Biden’s assessment, the situation already was unwinnable’.
If it is the first, then it indeed suggests recklessness; if the second — it was the wiser, if more difficult, course.
We shall see which comes out on top. For the moment, however, the actual clash of opinion may be less significant than how it divides up. For the two views have coalesced into a sharp, but telling, division between elite and popular opinion, both in the United States, but to a far greater extent in the UK.
For weeks now, almost no voices have been heard on the UK airwaves or in much of the rest of what we now call the ‘mainstream media’ supporting withdrawal. We have heard the leading lights of the parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, a clutch of ex-servicemen turned politicians, the estimable Rory Stewart — whose first-hand knowledge of Afghanistan may be second to none — any number of members of the former top brass, and the Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, himself, all saying in so many words that the US President has made a terrible mistake.
