The Original Sin of Biden’s Foreign Policy

In Toronto a few weeks ago I met a young Afghan woman in her mid-20s. She had worked for an international aid agency in Afghanistan helping women suffering mental health problems. As Taliban forces surged across the country in 2021, she tried desperately to flee, knowing that she would be punished for having worked with foreigners. She did eventually get out, together with her younger brother and sister, fleeing first via Iran to Brazil. Then she undertook a treacherous odyssey across South America, through the Panama jungle, across former U.S. President Donald Trump’s wall, through the United States, and eventually to Canada.

Her story is extraordinary for its bravery, but it is by no means unique. Countless Afghans did whatever they could to escape murder, torture, rape, and forced marriages. A lucky few were airlifted to safety by Western forces as they evacuated Kabul’s airport. Many more were abandoned back home to their fates. Others undertook dangerous odysseys. The fortunate have begun new lives; many more are stranded in refugee camps. Countless numbers have died during their treacherous journeys.

They are all statistics and all victims of a bigger power game. They were let down by the United States and its allies who, from the moment of their invasion in 2001 to their calamitous exit 20 years later, claimed to know what was best for Afghanistan. Operation Enduring Freedom, in which more than 3,500 international service personnel were also killed, provided no enduring freedom, only the fleeting hope for Afghans of a better life that was suddenly and brutally snuffed out.

Throughout, one man has been defiant. U.S. President Joe Biden followed through on the policy set in train by Trump, his predecessor. Long before he entered the White House, Biden had criticized the commitment of hundreds of thousands of U.S. forces for what had long seemed to be futile military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. This was one of several areas of U.S. foreign and security policy where Biden continued Trump’s work—though neither side saw it in their interests to trumpet that continuity. Even amid the terrible scenes that took place at Kabul International Airport in August 2021, reminiscent of the fall of Saigon half a century earlier, Biden stuck with his assessment: “I was not going to extend this forever war, and I was not extending a forever exit.”

Amid the recriminations, numerous congressional inquiries were undertaken, and reports were issued during the first few months that followed the debacle. Films have since been made and books have been written seeking to explain what happened and who is most culpable. By contrast, policymakers and military chiefs quickly moved on. Their attention turned to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and then to the Israel-Hamas-Middle East imbroglio. All the while, China is seen as the biggest long-term strategic threat to Western interests. To be fair to them, it seems inconceivable that Washington or its allies would have the resources or the political support to maintain a presence in Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, it is useful to return to what went wrong in Afghanistan precisely from a policymaking perspective, and not just a moral one. Like many of the never-ceasing crises that have enveloped the world since, the Afghanistan withdrawal was a story of the good intentions and honest efforts of diplomats and military personnel doing what they could to protect as many people as they could. But it was also a story of fatal misjudgments on the ground and among political decisionmakers.

A new account by the British ambassador at the time (forthcoming in the United States, but already released in Britain), Laurie Bristow, provides important further insights into the disaster as it unfolded.

Even before Bristow arrived in Kabul on June 14, 2021, he knew his term would be short. The agreement for “bringing peace to Afghanistan” that the Trump administration had signed in Doha, Qatar, with the Taliban on Feb. 29, 2020, was one of the more disreputable deals of modern times. It was not only naïve in believing that the Taliban would stick to the agreed timetable and that, somehow, incredibly, they had reformed into something more modern, but it ostentatiously excluded other key participants—none other than the Afghan government itself and the Americans’ key allies throughout the campaign, not least the Brits.

Throughout the first half of 2021, as the United States kept to its side of the bargain by drawing down its troops, a sense of foreboding quickly led to panic. The Taliban faced almost no resistance as they swept across the country.

For the British Embassy, one of the main tasks was identifying which Afghans were eligible for emigration under its Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP). In his account, written in diary format, Bristow describes fraught meetings with local employees and advisors, all of whom knew what would happen to them if they were abandoned to their fate.

“We sat in a circle in the embassy garden next to the war memorial, with one of the men translating for those who needed it. I invited each one of them to have their say, one at a time,” Bristow writes on Aug. 5. “The women spoke first, coherently and at length. One of them, an older woman, was confident and spoke with natural authority, not deferring at all to the men. There was fear and anger in the air, and some tears were wiped away, but tempered with the Afghans’ natural courtesy and dignity.” Bristow notes: “It was impossible for me to look them in the eye and tell them I thought the decisions to refuse their applications for resettlement were justified.”

Some were lucky; most were not. In any case, the situation was hurtling out of control, and it was impossible for the bureaucrats back home to keep up with the applications. Within days, the Brits and other international forces were preparing to evacuate their embassies for the airport. They disposed of anything that could offer the Taliban a propaganda victory. “Pictures of the Queen, flags, the official wine store. All had to be removed or destroyed.”

The chaotic scenes of those final days, between the Taliban declaring their takeover on Aug. 15 and the final evacuations of Aug. 21, are etched in the memory. Bristow recalls: “The airport was seizing up, overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people. The Americans alone had some 14,500 people on the airfield, waiting to be airlifted out of Kabul. At the gates and around the north terminal, everywhere you went and everywhere you looked, there were people: under awnings, in the open, in doorways. With children, elderly parents, heart-breaking luggage—whole lives packed into a battered case or a plastic supermarket bag.”

Back home, in Whitehall, it was peak summer holiday time. The foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, was with his family in Greece and angrily insistent that he should not be disturbed. While teams were working round-the-clock in Kabul and London to get as many people out as possible, the political operatives had other priorities. Bristow described it as “an ugly game of recrimination and buck-passing,” adding: “It looked to me that the priority of some in London was to spare ministers and their close advisers … personal and political embarrassment. … The advice, assessment and welfare of the people on the ground was of secondary importance.” One of the more hapless ministers of the Boris Johnson era—and there was much competition for that mantle—Raab saw his political career melt away soon after.

Bristow’s overall assessment is worth dwelling on: “The failure of the Afghanistan campaign was not for want of resources. In 2011, at the height of the ‘Obama Surge,’ NATO had more than 130,000 troops in Afghanistan. The U.K. spent over £30 billion on the military campaign and aid to Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021. US expenditure was on a truly biblical scale: between $1 trillion and $2 trillion over 20 years, more than the entire cumulative GDP of Afghanistan over that period. Yet these immense outlays, made over nearly two decades, had not brought peace or stability or good governance to Afghanistan.”

The Doha Agreement is, he adds, “a strong contender for the title of worst deal in history if it is understood as a serious attempt to achieve a negotiated settlement. But it was not. Trump’s deal was driven by something rather different: the U.S. electoral timetable.” Everybody he met who was familiar with Afghanistan was “aghast at Trump’s dismal deal with the Taliban and then at Biden’s botched execution of the withdrawal.”

In the maelstrom of the many crises of 2024, Afghanistan already feels like a footnote in history. One of the many lessons of its failure, Bristow writes, is the nature of cooperation between the United States and its allies. “[T]he U.K. was a junior partner, and we did not have an equal voice in U.S. decision making. The fact that we thought the military withdrawal unwise and badly thought through did not change U.S. policy.” This was the first big test, in other words, of “America First,” Trump-style and Biden-style, and everyone else was left flailing in its wake. And there will doubtlessly be more of this to come in other theaters of conflict, whether Biden wins re-election or not.