If recent history had followed President Joe Biden’s wishes and expectations, he would have addressed the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night as the party’s nominee for a rematch against former president Donald Trump. And he would have been able to boast about keeping his 2020 campaign promise to get U.S. troops out of Afghanistan.
By Charles Lane
The U.S. withdrawal in August 2021 stemmed from Biden’s strong belief that the “forever war” had grown unsustainably costly and that voters would reward a president who ended it. He had agitated for a pullout as vice president under Barack Obama; and, as president, Biden rejected top advisers’ recommendations to keep a small stabilizing force in the country. When doubters raised the specter of a chaotic Kabul bug-out, a la Saigon in 1975, Biden responded that the chances were: “None whatsoever. Zero.”
As it happened, the U.S. exit became a debacle, with 13 American service personnel and more than 200 Afghans killed. Biden’s approval rating plunged in the polls and never recovered. Age-related stumbles in the June 27 debate against Trump precipitated Biden’s ouster from the 2024 Democratic ticket, in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris; but his political decay started to set in three years ago this month.
And, so, Biden found himself giving a valedictory address on Monday night in Chicago; it ran to 5,000-plus words, but not one of them was “Afghanistan.” For the president, and his party, this is a sore subject about which the less said, the better. Rarely has a president so badly misjudged the consequences, substantive and political, of a foreign policy decision.
This is especially true given what has happened in that country since the United States left and the hard-line Islamist Taliban movement toppled a U.S.-backed regime.
Under their supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, a shadowy, unelected figure seldom seen in public, the Taliban has extinguished nearly all opposition and reverted to the harsh practices of its previous stint in power, which ended in 2001 when U.S. troops ousted it for harboring al-Qaeda terrorists.
Executions in stadiums have resumed. In February, officials let relatives of two murder victims fatally shoot the alleged perpetrators as thousands watched, according to the Associated Press. Public floggings and the stoning of accused adulterers are also back: In May 2023, an official of the Taliban-controlled Supreme Court reported that it had approved 37 stonings, in addition to 175 other corporal punishments.
The Taliban’s rule is cruelest for women. “You may call it a violation of women’s rights when we publicly stone them or flog them for committing adultery because they conflict with your democratic principles,” Akhundzada said on March 24, in a rare audio statement on government media. “I represent Allah and you represent Satan.” He added, “The Taliban’s work did not end with the takeover of Kabul; it has only just begun.”
The Taliban has barred most girls over the age of 12 from schools and universities, excluded women from public parks, forbidden them to take long-distance trips without a male guardian and required them to wear the head-to-toe burqa covering. Unsurprisingly, Afghan women are fleeing in increasing numbers but often cannot find refuge in neighboring countries.
According to a recent report from a United Nations special rapporteur for Afghanistan, “The system of discrimination, segregation, disrespect for human dignity and exclusion institutionalized by the Taliban is motivated by and results in a profound rejection of the full humanity of women and girls.”
On Wednesday, the Taliban banned the rapporteur, Richard Bennett, from the country. This defiant move followed a statement from another Afghan official, at a U.N.-sponsored conference in June, who told the United States and other Western countries to stop pressuring the Taliban about “internal matters.” The Taliban’s self-confidence was on display on Aug. 15, the anniversary of Kabul’s fall, when they staged a huge parade of captured U.S. military vehicles at Bagram air base, the former U.S. headquarters.
Of course, Republicans can’t stop saying “Afghanistan.” The chaos of August 2021, which Trump called “the worst humiliation in the history of our country,” was a theme of the party’s convention last month in Milwaukee, though the GOP emphasized the 13 U.S. service members killed, not the Taliban’s horrific rule. This is hypocritical: Trump himself was pursuing a negotiated exit with the Taliban, and there is no guarantee his version would have gone any smoother — despite his claims to the contrary. The GOP is on firmer ground, though, when it argues the U.S. abandonment of Kabul might have emboldened Russia to move against Ukraine.
Though the Taliban likes to show off captured U.S. weaponry, so far, the Afghanistan-based terrorists have not attacked the United States (though wanted terrorist Sirajuddin Haqqani serves as the regime’s interior minister). Preventing that was the main objective of the U.S. intervention, as Biden says. There had to be some limits on how much time and money Washington would pour into Afghanistan; remaking it in America’s liberal, democratic image would have been the work of generations.
For now, the United States and other Western countries are refusing to recognize or aid Afghanistan unless the Taliban respects women’s rights. Yet as the Taliban entrenches its rule, the question of whether Biden could have done anything differently haunts his presidential legacy. “You’ve heard me say it before, we’re facing an inflection point, one of those rare moments in history when the decisions we make now will determine the fate of our nation and the world for decades to come,” Biden said on Monday night. That includes his decision to leave Afghanistan.
