The Real Tragedy of Afghanistan

Any story of the August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan must begin in the earliest days of the Obama administration, when the young president, possessed with an overwhelming mandate to end the endless wars begun by his predecessor, was rolled by members of his own cabinet—most notably Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—and his top military and intelligence advisers, who together prevented the president from doing what he was sent to Washington to do: End the disastrous wars begun under George W. Bush.

Almost alone among Obama’s advisers counseling withdrawal were his vice president, Joe Biden, and Biden’s longtime adviser Tom Donilon, then serving as Obama’s national security adviser. 

Twelve years later, President Biden must have felt some measure of satisfaction that it was he who was able to do that which his two predecessors, Obama and Trump, could or would not, when he ordered the final withdrawal of American troops from that Central Asian wasteland. 

And yet, as with anything involving Biden and his national security team of Keystone Cops, all did not go as planned. 

The decision to withdraw from Afghanistan was and remains a deeply divisive one. While Biden for once showed some measure of political courage in ordering the withdrawal, the execution went badly awry. Tragically, on Aug. 26, 2021, thirteen American soldiers and 170 Afghan civilians were killed in a terrorist attack by the Islamic State–Khorasan Province at the Abbey Gate of Hamid Karzai International Airport.

The reaction to the botched withdrawal from America’s own militants was swift. Clutching his pearls on CBS’s Face the Nation, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham exclaimed, 

We set the conditions for another 9/11. I’ve never been more worried about an attack on our homeland than I am right now. And we did not end this war. President Biden said that he wanted to take Afghanistan off the plate for future presidents. He’s done the exact opposite. For the next 20 years, American presidents will be dealing with this catastrophe in Afghanistan. This war has not ended. We’ve entered into a new deadly chapter. Terrorists are now in charge of Afghanistan.

Needless to say, none of this came about. In point of fact, it was the Taliban, once in power, that ended up taking out the perpetrator of the Abbey Gate attack. And, as an actual military expert, the decorated combat veteran and The American Conservative contributing editor Douglas Macgregor, told TAC this week, 

The sudden, rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan removed the failed American ‘whole of government’ fiasco in Southwest Asia from the national spotlight, but at great cost, revealing the acute lack of professional military competence in the senior ranks of the U.S. Armed Forces.

Criticism of Biden’s decision to withdraw has become a staple of Trump’s stump speeches. Missing from the criticism is the fact that the ceasefire agreement signed under Trump between the U.S. and the Taliban in February 2020 provided the US with a four-month window to withdraw—this would have been true regardless of who was president. Trump often claims that, unlike Biden, he would have kept Bagram airfield. Speaking at a rally in late July, Trump claimed, 

I was getting out. After 21 years you get the hell out, but I would have kept Bagram. It’s one hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons. We gave it to them so stupidly.

Translation: If I were president, we’d still be there. 

His criticism reeks of opportunism. But still more, what it misses is that the entire enterprise was a tragedy—from start to finish—because it was unnecessary. The Taliban did not attack America; Al Qaeda did. Besides al Qaeda, the main movers behind 9/11 were Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Recall that Ahmad Uhmar Sheikh, at the direction of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence director general, General Mahmoud Ahmed, wired $100,000 to 9/11 hijacker Mohomed Atta. Bin Laden was hiding out in Abbottabad, Pakistan, with the connivance of ISI. 

Meantime, a lawsuit brought by 9/11 families in May shows that,

Saudi government officials and agents were acting within the core of their functions for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in coordinating an essential support network for pro-jihadist extremists, including the first-arriving 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf Al Hazmi and Khalid Al Mihdhar.

Still more, over the summer it was reported that a close associate of the aforementioned Nawaf Al Hazmi and Khalid Al Mihdhar, Omar Al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national with purported links to Saudi intelligence, filmed the entrances, exits and security checkpoints of Washington, DC landmarks. The video was kept from the American public for over twenty years.

The tragedy of Afghanistan cannot simply be consigned to the terrible events at Abbey Gate. The tragedy is that there are perpetrators of 9/11 who have never been brought to justice because the U.S. national security apparatus decided, in its wisdom, to pursue a twenty year long sideshow in Afghanistan designed to distract the American public from our actual enemies. Time and again, from October 7, 2001 to this very moment, the government has assiduously worked to divert our eyes from our “Saudi and Pakistani partners” elsewhere: to secular, multi-confessional Syria (2012); to Libya, which posed no threat to us (2011); and most fatefully, to Iraq (2003). And if the foreign policy establishment gets its way, Iran will be next.