Los Angeles Times
The killing of at least 13 U.S. service members, mostly Marines, and dozens of civilians in a pair of suicide attacks outside the Kabul airport is an outrageous act of terrorism — in this case, at the hands of ISIS-K, an Islamic State affiliate that is active in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
President Joe Biden was right to vow vengeance. “We will not forgive, we will not forget, we will hunt you down and we will make you pay,” he said at the White House.
The attacks are not, however, the work of the Taliban, which has retaken Afghanistan in mere weeks as the Western-backed government and security forces collapsed with scarcely a fight.
Nor are the attacks a sign of failure by the Biden administration, as a host of armchair critics, Washington commentators and Republican cynics have suggested.
In the 11 days before the president addressed the nation Thursday afternoon, the U.S. military had evacuated 100,000 people from Kabul — 7,000 in the previous 12 hours alone. These airlifts have been one of the most complex logistical undertakings in military history, reminiscent of the British evacuation at Dunkirk in 1940 and the Berlin airlift of 1948-49.
Critics of the evacuations have made entirely disingenuous, self-serving or simply misleading arguments over the last two weeks. Here is an attempt to address the major criticisms.
Why do we have to leave Afghanistan at all?
President Donald Trump, in direct negotiations with the Taliban that excluded the Afghan government, agreed in February 2020 to a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces by May 1, 2021. When Biden took office, he postponed the deadline to Sept. 11, 2021 (later moved up to Aug. 31). Biden, whose objections — while he was vice president — to further intervention in Afghanistan were overruled by President Barack Obama more than a decade earlier, has been steadfast and consistent in arguing that the Afghanistan war had achieved its main objective — eliminating the terrorist threat from al-Qaida — and promising that he would not hand off the problem to a fifth president. He has kept that promise.
Why not maintain an uneasy status quo indefinitely, keeping about 2,500 U.S. troops on the ground?
Aside from the fact that Trump had considered this option and rejected it, would the American people really want an indefinite troop presence in Afghanistan after spending more than $1 trillion and losing about 2,400 military members? A majority of Americans want out of Afghanistan.
But didn’t Biden bungle the planning and execution of the withdrawal?
The administration has acknowledged that the Afghan government collapsed far faster than intelligence analysts and most military and diplomatic experts had anticipated. Fair enough. But the truth is that the Afghan government had itself urged against a mass evacuation, fearing that the sight of thousands of Afghans leaving on planes would undermine the already shaky confidence in the government of President Ashraf Ghani and his Western-backed forces.
Send comments to [email protected].
