Abandoning Afghanistan: The moral and other costs

A catastrophic failure of American foreign policy

On the first anniversary of the fall of Kabul, we should pause and reflect on the catastrophic nature of the decision by President Joe Biden to withdraw all American troops and contractors from Afghanistan, a process which was completed by August 31, 2021.

As we wrote here on August 6, 2022,¹

We have warned repeatedly about President Joe Biden’s disastrous foreign policy judgment and the incompetence of his foreign policy team.

Both have led to catastrophic faulures of U.S. foreign policy.  These include:

1)  The decision to withdraw all American (and by implication NATO) forces and contractors from Afghanistan.

The withdrawal of all contractors guaranteed the fall of the Afghan government of Ashraf Ghani, because without them the Afghan air force could not fly.

2)  The decision to take tbe use of force off the table in terms of a NATO response to a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Biden repeatedly broadcast this decision to Putin after November 2021. The decision itself was a continuation of Barack Obama’s policy, first announced in 2014.

3)  The decision to not pressure Nancy Pelosi to postpone her recent trip to Taiwan.

Strategically, the withdrawal was particularly unfortunate, given the massing of Russian troops on Ukraine’s border in an obvious threat of invasion in the spring of 2021.

Unilaterally, the United States gave up a highly developed set of military bases, including Baghram Air Base, in a militarily strategic country bordering Russia.

The withdrawal decision and its botched execution may well have been major factors in Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a massive invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

Abandoning Afghanistan: The moral costs

From The Trenchant Observer, September 3, 2021

In an article in TIME on August 20, 2021,² Angelina Jolie gives expression to feelings evoked by the American abandonment of the girls and women and the people of Afghanistan to the Taliban. She writes:

Whatever your views on the war in Afghanistan, we probably agree on one thing: it should not have ended this way.

Giving up the idea of a peace agreement between the Afghan government and the Taliban, appearing to cut and run, and abandoning our allies and supporters in the most chaotic way imaginable, after so many years of effort and sacrifice, is a betrayal.

I think of injured American servicemen and women I met at Ramstein Air Base—some who’d lost limbs fighting the Taliban— who told me how proud they felt to be a part of helping the Afghan people gain basic rights and freedoms.

I think of every Afghan girl who picked up her bookbag and went to school in the last twenty years even though she risked being killed for it—as so many were. In one district in Kabul, more than a hundred people have been killed in attacks targeting school girls in the last year alone.

I think of the Afghan women who served as lawyers and judges and police officers—even as their female friends and colleagues were murdered in cold blood, with the number of assassinations tripling in 2020.

I think of all the Afghan children and teenagers, now living in fear about the future. And the activists and journalists and artists who are in hiding, deleting their social media profiles and burning documents in a bid to keep themselves and their families safe. Some having to avoid sleeping more than one night in any one place like fugitives.

President Joe Biden ridiculed the Afghan soldiers who did not fight after the American withdrawal left them with no prospect of holding their own against the Taliban. Biden's remarks were a cruel attack upon soldiers who had founght valiantly over the years, at a cost of some 68,000 lives.

He didn't mention the girls of Afghanistan, who for 20 years displayed great courage in going to school, too many times at the cost of their lives. Angelina Jolie pays tribute to these girls and women, and their courage.

Biden and his foreign policy team have sought to advance the cold-eyed calculations which led him to announce the American withdrawal. Actually, they have advanced a narrative based on lies and misrepresentations of facts--a cruel and dishonorable parody of reality-- to justify Biden's disastrous decision.

But lost in their base justifications, their defenses of the indefensible, are any references to the moral issues involved in abandoning the Afghans and their democratic project, after 20 years of pledging steadfast support for both.  They don't talk about how important it is for a nation to stand by its commitments.

Even on the cold grounds of "reason of state", which particularly before World War I was also referred to as raison d'état, that is, the justification of state behavior without any reference to moral values, the Biden decision was a collossal strategic blunder.

After experiencing where reason of state can lead to, after experiencing Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, and World War II, and Joseph Stalin and his horrrendous crimes, in 1945 the nations of the world created the United Nations and a Charter which established a framework  for international relations based on international law, and a firm rejection of raison d'état.

In 1948, the U.N. General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which has been followed by many treaties upholding those rights. The U.N. has established the International Criminal Court and in its 1992 Rome Statute provided for individual criminal liability for violations of fundamental rights by committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Abandoning 38 million people to a totalitarian movement based on the systematic violation of human rights necessarily involves moral issues.

Indeed, these moral issues are the moral issues of our age.

It will take some time to digest the enormous moral catastrophe represented by Joe Biden's decision to retreat in the face of a totalitarian regime which is the antithesis of all the United Nations stands for: the protection of human rights and the government of relations between states through law--international law--which includes the guaranty of women's rights, the prohibition of torture, and the prohibition of war crimes such as hunting down and executing individuals who were officials and adherents of the previous regime.

Biden's catastrophic withdrawal will be seen by historians as the greatest foreign policy disaster since the Munich Pact in 1938, by which the governments of England and France turned over the German-speaking population of the Sudetenland, a part of Czechoslovakia, to the totalitarian government of Adolf Hitler.

Biden's surrender to the Taliban was comparable in its infamy.

It will take time for us to absorb and respond to the the moral depravity which Biden demonstrated in turning his back on the Afghan people, and the horrific consequences which will flow, and which are already flowing, from his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan.

The accounting for Biden, and for the American people, will be painful. It has only just begun.

The Trenchant Observer

Afghanistan and the Decline of Enlightenment Values

From The Trenchant Observer, August 12, 2022

The withdrawal of the U.S. and its allies from Afghanistan, and its inenluctable consequences, represent a signal retreat by the U.S. and its democratic allies from the defense of democratic values and the ideal of democracy.

The great tragedy is that 20 years of support for the democratic project in Afghanistan had produced impressive progress, in what was necessarily a long-term project. The failure of U.S. military and political leaders to understand and accept the long-term nature of the project—framing the question of Afghanistan as one of "When can we bring the troops home?"--was the fundamental and ultimately fatal flaw in U.S. strategy in the country.

Powerless. That's how I and many others feel in the face of President Joe Biden's decision to withdraw completely from Afghanistan. Despite the wholly predictable consequences of that decision, Biden remains stubbornly defiant, ignoring or indifferent to the realities unfolding before him.

Powerless, as undoubtedly many millions of Afghans in Kabul, Kandahar, Herat and other cities and towns must feel today.

Powerless. Powerless to affect the addled thinking of President Biden, or that of the sycophantic members of his foreign policy and national security team.

We have turned our backs on 38 million people, after exhorting them for 20 years to build and defend democracy.

Americans make arguments such as the following:

1) The United States can 't be the world's policeman;
2) It's up to the Afghans to fight for their own country;
3) These people are backward and corrupt, and have a history and a culture that cannot support democracy;
4) It's not our problem. It's not our concern; and
5) If we couldn't beat the Taliban in 20 years, we never could. It’s time to get out, and to bring our troops home.

Rarely do Americans have any more knowledge of or any more informed opinions about Afghanistan and the consequences of U.S. withdrawal than those suggested by the arguments listed above.

The experts and generals and soldiers who know Afghanistan and its history and possibilities have made their arguments, or perhaps remained silent given the absence of a serious policy review and the preordained outcome of any debate.

The United States will get out of Afghanistan, because that's what Biden in his gut wants to do. He and his team are not susceptible to being influenced by rational arguments.

Those who have made reasoned arguments have lost.

Those who argue, as does the Trenchant Observer, that Congress should rise up and demand a reversal of this disastrous decision, or that European leaders should try to get members of the United Nations Security Council to save the day, know that such developments are unlikely, however great the urgency of pursuing them.

The lights are going out for democracy in Afghanistan.

The lights are also going out in America, that former beacon of democracy that once shone so brightly both as an ideal and through its example.

We are beyond reasoned argument.

History's tragic course, leading the world back to barbarism over and over again, resumes its flow. The bright vision of democracy and human rights and the values of the Enlightenment are in retreat, everywhere.

We have forgotten the lessons of the 20th Century.

International Peace and Security cannot be taken for granted. They depend on support for and adherence to international law, and the constant reaffirmation of international law, including human rights law and humanitarian law.

We have fogotten the lesson that aggression and crimes against humanity and war crimes must be vigorously resisted, or their perpetrators, like Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, will triumph.

We have forgotten the lessons of Srebrenica, that crimes against humanity must be resisted, stopped, and punished.

Ultimately, as for the withdrawal, there can be no rational defense of stupidity.

Stupidity may accompany a lack of empathy or sense of moral imperatives to defend sacred moral values.

Regardless of whether it is the product of callous indifference or brute stupidity, or a combination of the two, Biden's withdrawal decision seems to be set in stone.

And even the rational analyst's criticisms, like those of the historian's, may fall like ashes into the dark canyon of oblivion.

Will the values of the Enlightenment be saved, resuscitated to light the way of a stumbling humanity which has lost its way?

It all depends on us.

With deep faith in humanity, surely on a brighter day, those of us who are creatures of the Enlightenment and who still believe in the highest values of humanity will again somehow find our way.

For we must.

The Trenchant Observer

The Trenchant Observer has been following Afghanistan closely since 2005, when he worked in Kabul as the Team Leader of group of six lawyers charged with advising the government on modernizing its criminal justice process to better meet international human rights standards.

See also these recent articles from the Trenchant Observer

(1) “One year after the fall of Kabul: The current situation in Afghanistan,” The Trenchant Observer, August 17, 2022.

(2) “Ukraine War, August 17, 2022: It is time to get serious and end this war,” The Trenchant Observer, August 17, 2022.

(3) “Ukraine War, August 14, 2022: News media add to threat to democracy in India; Hindu nationalism 75 years after partition,” The Trenchant Observer, August 14, 2022.

(4) “Ukraine War, August 13, 2022: "Britain should prepare for a nuclear war," says British nuclear expert,” The Trenchant Observer, August 13, 2022.

FOOTNOTES

1. “Pelosi's visit to Taiwan and Biden's catastrophic foreign policy failures,” Trenchant Observations, August 6, 2022.

2. Angelina Jolie, "The People of Afghanistan Deserve So Much Better Than This," TIME, August 20, 2021 ( 4:09 PM EDT)..