The darkest day of Joe Biden’s still new presidency becomes darker and even more tragic when we pause to rethink about just how and why it all happened.
Especially: how 13 U.S. troops working safety missions and 170 Afghan civilians fleeing the Afghan Taliban to find new safe lives ended up killed Thursday in a crush of humanity outside Kabul airport that made them easy prey for an awaiting ISIS-K terrorist suicide-bomber.
Looking back, we can see how the missteps and misjudgments of big-credentialed deciders half a world away put in motion the confluence of events that will now forever be known in history by their unintended consequences. It ended with a new American president, who was determined to end America’s never-won war in Afghanistan, making the command decisions that ended up with America instantly suffering its most devastating military fatalities in a decade. And what made the tragedy downright Shakespearian was that none of it occurred because President Biden ordered a risky mission in an effort to win the war. No, his commands were only about trying to end the war in a way that would most look like America was at least losing it with honor.
On day one of his presidency, Biden knew this much for certain: His predecessor, Donald Trump, had cut a deal with the Taliban a year earlier in which he signed what amounted to a surrender — he pledged the United States would withdraw all its troops from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021. Of course, Trump was widely criticized for setting an end date that the enemy would know all about. But Trump didn’t care — because the Taliban agreed not to attack the U.S. troops as the U.S. withdrew them.
But Biden also knew Trump hadn’t done any of the tough things he needed to do for America’s Afghan allies who would be left to fight the war without U.S. or NATO forces in even a supporting role. Biden’s top two advisers were his former Senate and vice presidential aides — Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who were skilled at helping Biden do what he wanted done.
Both knew well that Biden was determined to withdraw all U.S. troops on a date certain, just as Trump had done. All three of them were quite public in explaining their options as if it was just a binary choice: withdraw or keep fighting an unwinnable forever war. So in April Biden announced he would withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 2021, apparently thinking it was smart to use the 9/11 two-decade anniversary. Many others thought it was unwise and un-cute. The Taliban hated it and re-upped its war-making.
Then Biden made his real problem worse. To show his withdrawal was proceeding successfully, he moved his final pullout date even earlier — to Aug. 31. The Taliban made Biden’s choice as its demand deadline and desperate Afghans who included America’s former civilian translators rushed to funnel frantically into the one small getaway site that America had selected: the one-runway Kabul airport.
Biden-Blinken-&-Sullivan had created conditions that became a tragic trap that may well have been avoided. Consider this: What if Biden had decided, even before April, not to set a specific date publicly — but commit to a total withdrawal at some unspecific time in autumn depending upon the safety situation on the ground. And what if, back in springtime, Team Biden also began moving aggressively yet quietly to begin extracting all its Afghan civilian allies who feared vengeance from a future victorious Taliban? Evacuate them family by family. No major high-visibility airlift, but with swift business-as-usual gratitude that would send them to the U.S., Europe, Guam, wherever.
Also, as I recently wrote, news coverage for well over a year showed the Afghan military collapsing as its unpaid, unfed and way under-armed troops were accepting Taliban buyouts and going home. So Team Biden absolutely needed to devise, back in April, a Worst Case Scenario exit plan: What would they do if the Afghan military swiftly collapsed and the corrupt Afghan government swiftly flew the Kabul coop?
Afghan women who saw the western way as their one chance at a real life would be re-enslaved in the Taliban version of ShariaWorld as they saw their trusted Uncle Sam was also fleeing the Kabul coop. YouTube news videos would look, to all the world, like Fifty Shades of Red-White-&-Blue.
But savvy, careful and practical planning by Biden-Blinken-Sullivan, plus a Pentagon of policymaking military minds who were more skilled at telling toughest truths to power, could have at least minimized the present tragedy. Instead, in the first year of Biden’s Shakespearian presidency, America’s Afghanistan withdrawal became an ISIS-K target of terror.
Martin Schram, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive. Readers may send him email at martin.schram@gmail.com.
