Liberal Commentator Analyzes the Biden Afghanistan Debacle

This matters because of who wrote it. As has become something of a habit, I think it useful to read liberal columnists when they offer sensible and sane commentary. Given our current state of political affairs, it is very rare indeed that a liberal columnist will call out the commentariat for its prejudice against Donald Trump and will, more importantly, highlight the appalling failures of the Biden presidency.

I have written about the incipient fall of Afghanistan a couple of times this week. It is an important story. It will define the Biden presidency. In large part the events in that country have exposed the rotten foundation upon which the Biden administration rests.

One notes that the Afghanistan story has begun to occupy an increasing amount of space in all of the nation’s great newspapers. So, ignoring the story has become impossible.

I have quoted the eminent Financial Times foreign policy analyst Gideon Rachman before. In yesterday’s column he did an excellent job of analyzing the extent of the Biden failure in Afghanistan. 

He opens by saying that the corrupt American commentariat is treating Biden quite differently than it would Donald Trump. Rachman does not mince words. He talks about a debacle and about policy that is irresponsible and immoral.

If Donald Trump were presiding over the debacle in Afghanistan, the US foreign policy establishment would be loudly condemning the irresponsibility and immorality of American strategy. Since it is Joe Biden in the White House there is instead, largely, an embarrassed silence.

Rachman recognizes, as we have, that Trump was working to withdraw from Afghanistan-- it was not his finest hour-- but he adds that the current debacle is the responsibility of the merry band of jesters who surround Joe Biden.

It is true that Trump set the US on the path out of Afghanistan and began the delusional peace talks with the Taliban that have gone nowhere. But rather than reverse the withdrawal of troops, Biden accelerated it.

If our military had been semi-competent, it would have foreseen the results. You wonder how the Pentagon officials who are spouting the Biden party line can sleep at night-- they are completely undermining their dignity, their integrity and their reputations:

The horrific results are unfolding on the ground in Afghanistan, as the Taliban take city after city. The final collapse of the government looks inevitable. It may come just in time for the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that originally led to the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

In the meantime, Biden sounded like the detached brain damaged fool that he is:

Earlier this week, Biden was channelling Edith Piaf, claiming he had no regrets about pulling the rug out from under the Afghan government. Last month, the president was still insisting that the “likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely”. Who knows what he will be saying next month? And, frankly, who cares? On Afghanistan, Biden’s credibility is now shot.

Whatever you think of Biden’s brain functioning, he has lost all credibility. And thus, he has lost the ability to lead the world, even the world’s democratic nations. Considering that this was one of his leading selling points during the presidential campaign, the fact that he has been exposed as a pathetic excuse for a world leader matters a great deal.

The broader strategic question is what the unfolding disaster in Afghanistan will do for US credibility around the world. Discussing the situation there as a question of high global politics feels distasteful while a tragedy unfolds on the ground. But, beyond simple war-weariness, Biden’s principal justification for the Afghan withdrawal was strategic. In recent remarks, he argued that the US cannot “remain tethered” to policies created in response “to a world as it was 20 years ago. We need to meet the threats where they are today.” The first threat that Biden identified was “the strategic competition with China”.

Rachman calls a defeat a defeat, and then asks how that plays in the current clash of civilizations. At the least, it does not make America look like a winning team.

So how does America’s defeat in Afghanistan — in reality, a defeat for the entire western alliance — play into the growing rivalry between Washington and Beijing?

The US failure makes it much harder for Biden to push his core message that “America is back”. By contrast, it fits perfectly with two key messages pushed by the Chinese (and Russian) governments. First, that US power is in decline. Second, that American security guarantees cannot be relied upon.

If the US will not commit to a fight against the Taliban, there will be a question mark over whether America would really be willing to go to war with China or Russia. Yet America’s global network of alliances is based on the idea that, in the last resort, US troops would indeed be deployed to defend their allies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere.

Strategically, the current failed policy in Afghanistan plays into the hands of America’s enemies and opponents.

China is already the dominant economic power in east Asia. But most Asian democracies look to the US as their main security partner. So it is very helpful to Beijing if Washington’s credibility is undermined. Of course, the situations and stakes in Taiwan or the South China Sea are different from those in Afghanistan. But events there will still resonate around the world.

Since the Biden team has assured us that Kabul will not become a repeat of the fall of Saigon-- event that was surely hastened by a Democratic Congress that undercut funding for the South Vietnamese government-- you can be fairly confident that it will. The notion, reported by Rachman and in various other places, that America is trying to persuade the Taliban to leave the U. S. Embassy alone should be completely humiliating in itself. Perhaps not as humiliating as the idiotic notion that we are going to prosecute them for war crimes, but still:

In Washington, the parallel that will be uppermost in the minds of policymakers is Vietnam. There are already reports that America is trying to persuade the Taliban not to storm the US embassy in Kabul in order to avoid a repetition of the scenes when Saigon fell in 1975. Last month, Biden insisted that the “Taliban is not the North Vietnamese army. They’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability.” He may come to regret those words.

The Americans know, however, that if they decide to pull out the last remnants of the US presence in Kabul, they will be in effect signing the death warrant of the Afghan government. The collapse in morale which has already led to successive defeats for the Afghan army across the country would become irreversible. But, in truth, the situation already looks all but irrecoverable.

While Biden administration officials tout the numbers of Afghan soldiers and the equipment we have graciously sent them, the truth is as Rachman notes-- the Taliban is winning because the morale of the Afghan army does not exist:

Unlike the Afghan government, however, the US administration has a few straws of hope to cling to. The end of the Vietnam war was indeed a debacle. Many questioned American power in its aftermath. But within fourteen years of the fall of Saigon, the cold war was over, and the west had won.

The last point is worth noting. It is true that Vietnam was a battle within a larger war, the Cold War. We lost the battle but eventually won the war. Then again, we didn’t do it thanks to Democratic leadership. And we ought not to forget that the death of Mao Zedong, leading to the advent of a more capitalist regime in China, contributed greatly to that outcome. 

In the end, the struggle between the American and Soviet systems turned not on events in Vietnam but on the relative strengths of the two countries’ domestic economies and political systems. The current rivalry between the US and China may be determined in the same way. But that abstract thought is little comfort to the beleaguered people of Afghanistan.

A solid piece of analysis, well worth your attention, even if I cannot link to the FT.