There is no question that we should have gotten out of Afghanistan – in fact we should have gotten out long, long ago. So I give President Biden full credit for finally doing what several of his predecessors, in both political parties, promised to do, but didn’t. But the Biden administration – including not only the President himself but his senior advisors in the White House, the State Department, the Defense Department, and the intelligence community – is fully responsible for the chaotic way we exited.
The level of either incompetence or, as some have suggested, irresponsible turf battles between agencies, is hard to fathom. Many people both in and out of government were bombarding the White House and the State Department as far back as December 2020 with urgent requests to get moving on approving visas for endangered Afghans, yet the process was moving at a snail’s pace and the White House apparently never took the warnings seriously or felt any urgency until too late, until the final week when the Taliban took over most of Afghanistan in just a few days.
Once we were in the crisis, the troops on the ground and the air crews at Kabul airport behaved magnificently despite the danger and the chaos, and they took casualties. And in fact they did manage to evacuate more that 120,000 people. Biden takes credit for that, but he shouldn’t. The troops on the ground should get the credit for recovering the situation from his mistakes.
Nonetheless, we are finally out. Some critics claim that our exit calls into question our credibility. Well, it may do so for people with a shallow understanding of geopolitics, but as Peter Zeihan points out, the US is still by far the most powerful nation in the world, and those that really understand geopolitics will see our exit as a perfectly rational move very much (finally!) in our own national interest. Afghanistan was an unnecessary drain on our attention and resources, and those can now be turned to the issues that really matter to us, like containing China’s expansionist tendencies.
There is no doubt that some people in Washington should be fired, not only for so mishandling our exit from Afghanistan, but for being seduced for decades by the naïve international interventionist belief that we could “nation build” in an ancient Middle Eastern culture. But being Washington, probably no one will get fired, certainly no one in the upper echelons of government or politics. Some in fact may even get promoted. Accountability has never been a strong point in Washington politics.
But the question that remains is this: if we were so incompetent at handling Afghanistan, both for the 20 years while we were there, abetting and funding the corruption, and now as we exited, how competent is our government (and I include both political parties equally here) likely to be at handling our other major international issues, like China, North Korea, Iran, or Russia?
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