There is a mythology being developed by the Biden Administration and media outlets such as MSNBC in which the US has withdrawn from Afghanistan because it has been failed by the Afghani people, rather than it having failed them. Here's what President Biden said in his speech about the end of the war, prefaced by his comment that he'd always promised the American people he'd be straight with them:
The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.
American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong. Incredibly well equipped. A force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies. We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force, something the Taliban doesn’t have. Taliban does not have an air force. We provided close air support. We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.
These comments are reprehensible lies. While Biden's remarks refer specifically to the faster than anticipated march of the Taliban, he has clearly insinuated that the Afghans, and particularly the military and security forces ( ANDSF ) had failed to adequately use the materiel the US, at great expense, provided them. It must be so, else the logic of quitting because Afghans quit before us wouldn't hold. And yet it was the ANDSF which suffered and died in defense of the American cause, and between 2014, when NATO combat support ended and Ashraf Ghani became President, and 2018 some 45,000 ANDSF died fighting the Taliban. The Americans have lost some 4,000 soldiers and contractors between 2001 and 2018.
While it is true the US sought ANDSF force size of 300,000 or more and that this size is indeed larger than some NATO allies, it is also a force far larger than a nation the size of Afghanistan should be expected to maintain. It is more than 3x the number of active military per 1,000 citizens of Iraq, for example. And this might well have been a big part of the problem. Even Biden recognized the Afghani special forces were highly capable, suggesting a different emphasis might've been more effective. And the size of the ANDSF made it a major source of corruption, particularly with free-flowing dollars from the US. While the determination to spend whatever it takes is admirable, the "what it takes" portion apparently also includes necessary limits to and oversight of such spending.
While Biden claims the ANDSF was "incredibly well equipped", that can only be true on paper. In actual fact much of the advanced equipment provided by the US was only operable with maintenance performed and parts supplied by the US. Here's how Afghan General Sadat described the situation at the New York Times:
The Afghan forces were trained by the Americans using the U.S. military model based on highly technical special reconnaissance units, helicopters and airstrikes. We lost our superiority to the Taliban when our air support dried up and our ammunition ran out.
Contractors maintained our bombers and our attack and transport aircraft throughout the war. By July, most of the 17,000 support contractors had left. A technical issue now meant that aircraft — a Black Hawk helicopter, a C-130 transport, a surveillance drone — would be grounded.
The contractors also took proprietary software and weapons systems with them. They physically removed our helicopter missile-defense system. Access to the software that we relied on to track our vehicles, weapons and personnel also disappeared. Real-time intelligence on targets went out the window, too.
While I'm sure President Biden is being reasonably honest about the cost of the war, he is not at all honest about the support we gave to the Afghan government. All these systems, from small arms to C-130s to intelligence gathering, were dependent on US support. That doesn't sound like a particularly good strategy for exiting the war while leaving behind a capable and reliable ally. It sounds like the US made itself an indispensable partner, and thus ensured the necessity of its own presence even as it sought to exit. That policy worked well for American contractors and defense companies, as well as the elite in the Afghan military and government, but not so well for the average Afghan, or American for that matter.
It's worth asking why Biden would bother with any of these lies. There is a central oddity in his response to the withdrawal. He has suggested that his hands were tied by the previous administration, blaming the timeline for the pullout on Trump, even while he tries to take credit for the withdrawal itself. The media has abetted this political posturing, largely crediting Biden with ending the war when in fact it was Trump, on Biden's own logic, who did it. This is surely a response to Trump's having out-maneuvered Democrats on ending the war, and an attempt to maintain anti-war credibility on the left. But to do so, he is forced to retreat on another issue the Republicans long ago took from them:
We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001, and make sure Al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again...Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy. Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland...I’ve argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counterterrorism, not counterinsurgency or nation-building.
You might recall that during his campaign for the 2000 election, George W. Bush declaimed any interest in or responsibility for "nation-building". Some of his closest advisors after 9/11 represented the traditional view that the military exists to break things and blow sh*t up, particularly Dick Cheney, widely considered the most influential and powerful vice president in history, as well as Donald Rumsfeld. The W. administration maintained this view, with its consequent light "footprint" in terms of the American presence, in Afghanistan until at least as late as 2003. In February of that same year, then Senator Biden testified before congress:
“In some parts of this administration, ‘nation-building’ is a dirty phrase. But the alternative to nation-building is chaos — a chaos that churns out bloodthirsty warlords, drug-traffickers and terrorists. We’ve seen it happen in Afghanistan before — and we’re watching it happen in Afghanistan today.”
Then again in October:
“The fact of the matter is, we’ve missed an opportunity to do what many of us on this committee, including the senator about to sit down, have been pleading be done from the beginning. But because there has been this overwhelming reluctance on the part of some in the administration to get involved in genuine, quote, ‘nation-building,’ we essentially elected a mayor of Kabul and turned the rest over to the warlords, and we’re paying a price for it now.”
So clearly President Biden was for nation-building before he was against it, and indeed his language in October clearly contradicts his language in August 2021, in criticizing the failure of the US to create "a unified, centralized democracy". It has long been the tradition for hawkish liberals, or dovish conservatives if one prefers, to promote the concepts behind "nation-building" if not the term itself. It was this aspect of the W. administration which pushed for it, particularly Paul Wolfowitz and the neocons. Democrats took the lead, at least with regard to Afghanistan, on promoting democratization as a major part of the counter-terrorism effort. And they were right to do so.
Now, however, the failure of the war in Afghanistan on particularly that aspect is being used by Democrats, and particularly by "progressives", to attack the very concept. And Biden has joined his voice with theirs:
So I’m left again to ask of those who argue that we should stay: How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghan troops will not? How many more lives, American lives, is it worth, how many endless rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery? I’m clear on my answer: I will not repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past. The mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely in a conflict that is not in the national interest of the United States, of doubling down on a civil war in a foreign country, of attempting to remake a country through the endless military deployments of U.S. forces. Those are the mistakes we cannot continue to repeat because we have significant vital interest in the world that we cannot afford to ignore.
Note that this is a civil war the US largely engineered, and is now fleeing the consequences of its actions, leaving particularly the girls and women of Afghanistan to pay the price. Now Biden thinks nation-building is a mistake of the past, and that the US has no vital interest in Afghanistan, from whence al Qaeda, protected and aided by the Taliban, launched its attack on 9/11. It is true that al Qaeda as such no longer exists, having been fractured into dozens of lesser organizations, each without the resources and capabilities the original had. But lest we allow ourselves to think the present unpopularity there of organizations like ISIS-K prevents any cooperation between them and the Taliban, remember that al Qaeda was unpopular with much of the Taliban as well, and it was through them that Mullah Omar eventually won control of the Taliban itself.
It might well be true that Afghanistan is no longer a significant vital interest to the US. But democracy is, particularly in the Middle East, wbere the US has for generations supported various undemocratic regimes. Today it remains one of the least democratic regions in the world, and one of the most autocratic. Biden has this month signed off on that deal, without mentioning the betrayal of our allies the Kurds, or the relative success in Iraq. But what should we expect from a president who refuses to take the minimal necessary steps to protect the US itself?
