The military withdrawal from Afghanistan, in the second half of August 2021, was a disaster for the image of the United States in the world. Projecting an image of improvisation and chaos, it was based on a security co-production with the same Taliban forces that Washington had wanted to punish twenty years earlier. Following this sequence, the Biden administration launched a review of experience within the State Department and the Pentagon. Finally, two confidential reports have just been sent to Congress. On Thursday April 6, the White House also published, for the attention of the general public, a twelve-page summary which can be summed up as follows: an indictment of Donald Trump and a whitewashing of the current administration, with a slight hint of regret. “We are now prioritizing earlier evacuations when faced with deteriorating security situations”says the document, welcoming the subsequent crises in Ethiopia and Ukraine.
The Biden administration considers its room for maneuver in Afghanistan to be “severely restricted” by the “difficult realities” left as a legacy by Donald Trump, in particular the absence of any specific evacuation plan. The latter had concluded an agreement with the Taliban in Doha (Qatar), in February 2020, at the end of which the United States had committed to a withdrawal in fourteen months. In exchange, the Taliban agreed not to launch attacks against American forces and no longer harbor terrorists from Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State organization.
The 1is April 2021, Joe Biden had made the decision to conclude this operation on August 31. The administration still regards this military withdrawal as an absolute necessity. It was dictated by the national interest and imposed by the reality of the forces on the ground, after a continuous reduction, up to 2,500 soldiers, of the American presence. “At the end of the day, after more than twenty years, spending more than $2 trillion, and organizing an Afghan army of 300,000, the speed and ease with which the Taliban took control of the Afghanistan suggest that there was no other scenario that could have changed the trajectory, except for a permanent and significantly reinforced American military presence”explains the synthesis.
Patent failure of the American intelligence services
This hides two realities that are difficult to contest. The political will of Joe Biden to keep his campaign promise on an evacuation from Afghanistan has been deployed to the detriment of the partners of the United States and the Afghan people. Several European countries will choke on reading the satisfied passage on the “intense consultations at the highest level with the allies”and taking into account their “differences of opinion”. The second reality that does not appear clearly in the document is the patent failure of the American intelligence services. We can only guess between the lines. “As of late May 2021, the assessment was that Kabul was unlikely to come under serious pressure until late 2021, after the departure of US troops”, is it written. During the summer, the services continued to believe that the Afghan army would oppose the enemy advance.
You have 54.57% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.