The Black Snake Devours the Biden Presidency

Last weekend’s momentous events in Afghanistan, centered on the Taliban taking the capital Kabul, thereby collapsing the existing government, while forcing the shuttering of the U.S. Embassy there, constitutes a hinge point in world history. Nothing like it has been witnessed since 1989, when the Soviet empire began to fall apart – perhaps not coincidentally, just a few months after the Kremlin pulled its troops out of Afghanistan – culminating in the collapse of the Soviet Union itself two years later.

That hinge point created America’s unipolar moment, when U.S. hegemony stood triumphant over the globe, history supposedly had ended, and the postmodern Western democratic model, featuring open economies and free societies plus personal liberation, seemed to be the only viable option, at least for anybody seeking to be a “real” country. Even then, the Taliban were an outlier, a weird medieval throwback with their barbaric Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, which they established in 1996. It was easy to ignore them, with their ridiculous garb and unpleasant morals, at least until September 11, 2001, when 19 jihadists from Al-Qa’ida, a group which had partnered with the Taliban and enjoyed their sanctuary, felled the Twin Towers in Manhattan and blew up part of the Pentagon in the most important attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor 60 years before.

That day, the storied 9/11, birthed our War on Terrorism, bringing the rapid overthrow of the Taliban regime, and commenced our strangely diffident 20-year war in Afghanistan which came to an abrupt end over the weekend. That war, which since late 2014 has barely been a war at all – just 10 U.S. servicemembers died in Afghanistan in 2020, seven of them in accidents – stands as a painful testament to the broken nature of American war-making in this century, when our great military power time and again failed to deliver the hoped-for political outcomes promised by Washington.

Our 9/11 wars, frequently derided as America’s Forever Wars, have just come to an end – in enemy victory. There is no getting around the painful reality that, by taking back Afghanistan and reestablishing their Islamic Emirate, the Taliban won this conflict. They outlasted America and forced their will on Afghanistan, culminating in a Blitzkrieg-like advance across the country which few had considered possible. The illusion of Western power in the Greater Middle East evaporated in a couple days.

We ought to have no illusions here. The Taliban and their admirers across the Islamic world understand that they have just won a historic victory (we can assume they were as surprised by the celerity of their triumphant advance on Kabul as anyone) which looks like a divine verdict to many in the region. Salafi jihadists, who constitute a significant multinational movement of which the Taliban are a component, consider that they forced the demise of the Soviet Union three decades ago, via their victory in Afghanistan, and now they have defeated another “infidel” great power again, in the very same place.

President Joe Biden yesterday attempted to explain his decision-making concerning the disastrous withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in a manner which few outside the president’s hardcore fanbase found convincing or edifying. It’s evident that nobody in the White House seriously pondered that the Taliban might actually win, much less rapidly, as the U.S. military pulled out of the country. Biden yesterday blamed the Afghans, including their American-built security forces, which in most cases folded before the advancing Taliban without much fight. That, however, was unseemly and dishonest, since the Pentagon yet again built a local satellite military that looked a lot liked a scaled-down version of our military, and which therefore was wholly dependent on our logistical support and airpower to hold their own. When the Biden administration pulled those out this summer, it sealed the Afghan military’s fate. The Pentagon’s departure from the vast Bagram airbase complex at the beginning of July, which contained the only airfield in the country capable of handling our largest transport aircraft, abandoned the necessary sanctuary, and a last redoubt, for our forces in case things went wrong, as they did.

Now, we have 7,000 U.S. troops in or headed to Kabul to secure the departure of Americans and Afghans whom we seek to save from Taliban vengeance – a force almost three times the size of our 2,500-troop contingent which we recently withdrew. This has become a dark comedy, but nobody is laughing (except perhaps the Taliban). Planning for this complex withdrawal seems to have barely existed in any conventional sense, while the State Department appears to have no idea how Americans are now trapped in Talibanistan: 5,000 to 10,000 reportedly, but nobody knows, neither is there any plan to evacuate them, unless the Pentagon decides to deploy a lot more than 7,000 troops to Kabul, with orders to fight the Taliban to find and save Americans.

It’s difficult to see how this all could have gone much worse, amid appalling images of desperate Afghans clinging to departing U.S. Air Force transports, then falling to their deaths. At least U.S. Central Command has managed to bribe the Taliban to prevent them from shelling our evacuation efforts, which they easily could. Today the Pentagon stated that it plans to run this escape operation until the end of August, but there’s no guarantee that it can be accomplished in that limited time

How the hell did this happen? is the relevant question at hand. It’s fashionable in Washington to proclaim “intelligence failure” whenever something goes terribly wrong in our foreign policy, but there’s scant evidence for this claim. In fact, it’s been stoutly denied by Intelligence Community stalwarts such as former Acting CIA Director Mike Morrell, who explained on the weekend: “What is happening in Afghanistan is not the result of an intelligence failure. It is the result of numerous policy failures by multiple administrations. Of all the players over the years, the Intelligence Community by far has seen the situation in Afghanistan most accurately.” Morell would say that, of course, but he’s no Biden-hater, plus his view is widely shared across the IC.

We have ample evidence that it wasn’t the spooks who were fooling the Bidenistas with hopium about what was happening in Afghanistan. Just look at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s IC 2021 Annual Threat Assessment, which was published in early April of this year. It cut straight to the point on Afghanistan:  

We assess that prospects for a peace deal will remain low during the next year. The Taliban is likely to make gains on the battlefield, and the Afghan Government will struggle to hold the Taliban at bay if the coalition withdraws support.

· Kabul continues to face setbacks on the battlefield, and the Taliban is confident it can achieve military victory.

· Afghan forces continue to secure major cities and other government strongholds, but they remain tied down in defensive missions and have struggled to hold recaptured territory or reestablish a presence in areas abandoned in 2020.

That take was admirably clear and borne out by recent events. It’s also the IC’s unclassified take, for public release, so we should assume that the Top Secret intelligence which was passed to the Biden White House on the Taliban and their military capabilities was considerably more detailed about what was likely to happen in the event that the Pentagon pulled out of Afghanistan.

Of course, cries of “intelligence failure” often serve to mask failures of basic situational awareness. It’s tempting to blame the spooks when, really, your military doesn’t understand what’s going on around them. For years, there’s been considerable evidence that the U.S. military simply never did the work to understand the complexities of Afghanistan, and therefore the Pentagon kept repeating the same mistakes there. The reasons for this are many, including institutional pigheadedness, too-short tours in country that impeded the learning of important lessons, plus what ought to be termed bureaucratic escapism.

Not to mention that the Pentagon has been lying about the progress of its Afghan war: to civilians in Washington, to its political masters, and ultimately to itself. There’s not much in war that’s more hazardous than believing your own propaganda, and that seems to have happened to the U.S. military in Afghanistan. That said, evidence is mounting that the Biden White House ignored cautionary advice from Pentagon higher-ups, both military and civilian, about what would happen in the event of total U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan. To all appearances, Team Biden decided, against the counsel of the Defense Department and the Intelligence Community, to leave Afghanistan in time for the 20th anniversary of 9/11, consequences be damned.

That was a terrible mistake, one with vast geopolitical repercussions, and assessing why and how it came to pass merits serious and dispassionate investigation. Congress should examine this, but in our deeply polarized age, there’s scant reason to expect that sending this inquiry to Capitol Hill, where it belongs, will result in anything more than more partisan venom and rancor. The Biden White House kept with its predecessor’s deeply flawed peace talks with the Taliban, even though it was known that the Taliban had violated multiple aspects of that agreement, and notwithstanding that Biden was perfectly happy to scrap other Trump foreign policy initiatives which it disliked. It is all rather mysterious.

We know that President Biden desperately wanted his leaving Afghanistan not to result in scenes reminiscent of our harried flight from Saigon in April 1975. Indeed, Biden promised that painful scenes of helicopters ferrying scared Americans off our embassy roof would not be repeated, while assuring us that the Taliban wouldn’t quickly take over Afghanistan. Of course, that’s exactly what has happened, and our mounting Kabul debacle appears to be an even more shattering setback to American power and prestige than the fall of South Vietnam was. Biden was elected to be competent and compassionate compared to Trump, with his endless rage tweeting, amid reassurances that “the adults are back in charge” in Washington, yet none of that has been in evidence this week regarding the White House and Afghanistan.

Indeed, our humiliating pullout from Afghanistan is even more embarrassing than the Soviet pullout at the beginning of 1989, which the Kremlin made sure proceeded in a calm and orderly fashion, so as not to appear like the defeat it was. The 40th Army left Afghanistan with flags flying, showing good discipline, while the Soviet embassy in Kabul remain opened and unmolested even after the Soviet military withdrawal. Indeed, Moscow’s satellite regime in Kabul, contrary to everyone’s expectations, managed to hold out against the mujahidin resistance (some of whom would later become the Taliban) for three more years. The contrast now, with “our” Afghan satellite military and government having collapsed almost immediately, could not be more obvious or painful.

Thus, Russia can barely conceal its gloating at present, while China has taken to taunting tweets about what a weakened power and unreliable ally Biden’s America is now, yet the preeminent foreign winner here is Pakistan. The Taliban should not be viewed as a wholly independent actor. In many ways, it is a creation of Pakistan’s feared military intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, which has regarded the Taliban as “their guys” since the 1990s. That relationship is neither simple nor straightforward, nor always harmonious. The Taliban refer to the ISI cynically as “the Black Snake” since it looks out for Pakistan’s interests with an eagle’s eye, but in a pinch the ISI and the Taliban are partners. Islamabad is joyous that “their guys” have taken over in Kabul again, after a 20-year hiatus, since it means that Afghanistan won’t become an Indian proxy, thereby “encircling” Pakistan, which is the Pakistani military’s greatest fear.

The ISI’s relationship with the Taliban may prove a positive for the West in the short term at least, since it may not take kindly to the new regime inviting in lots of foreign jihadists to set up shop in Afghanistan, as was the custom before 9/11. That could be bad for Islamabad’s image abroad. Nevertheless, the ISI’s role in Talibanistan is a cancerous thing in the long run. For several years, in contrast to the decade after 9/11, Americans haven’t worried much about Salafi jihadist terrorism striking us at home, but fears about mass casualty Islamist terrorism may now reemerge as a political issue in the West.

Above all, American power and prestige have been irrevocably damaged by recent images coming out of Afghanistan. American hegemony, which had been waning for at least a decade, died last weekend in Kabul. Our friends are suddenly openly questioning the competence and reliability of Washington as an ally. We ought to be concerned that our rivals such as Iran, Russia, and especially China, which aren’t bothering to conceal their glee over Biden’s Afghan exit disaster, are no longer afraid of our military might, which was just taken down several notches by a bunch of theocratic goat-herders. That military mystique for decades has gone a long way to discouraging adventurism by our rivals and enemies, who rightly feared the long reach of the Pentagon, with its bombers, drones, and eyes all over the world. That now looks a bit like a paper tiger, as a previous Communist leader in Beijing liked to put it. The end of American hegemony means a less stable world, perhaps dramatically so. All we can say for certain after last weekend is that nothing will ever quite be the same again.