Washington:
President Joe Biden’s frustrations with Afghanistan boiled more than more than a decade ago, and they never ever once again eased.
On a trip to Kabul in January 2009, shortly ahead of he was sworn in as vice president, Biden warned Afghanistan’s then-President Hamid Karzai at a dinner that he could drop Washington’s help unless he began governing for all Afghans, hinting at corruption allegations targeting Karzai’s brother.
Karzai shot back that the United States was indifferent to the deaths of Afghan civilians.
As the dispute went on, Biden threw down his napkin and the dinner ended abruptly, according to various men and women in attendance.
Biden had previously supported powerful military and humanitarian efforts to rebuild Afghanistan following the United States toppled the Islamist Taliban government in retaliation for its aiding al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
But the clash with Karzai and the rest of a discomforting trip left Biden filled with a sense that Afghanistan’s war was ensnaring Washington and could be unwinnable.
He returned to Washington with a stern warning to President-elect Barack Obama: Now is not the time to place more troops in Afghanistan.
“It wasn’t simply impatience,” mentioned Jonah Blank, a longtime former Biden aide who was with him on the 2009 trip. “Year after year, his optimism started to drain away.”
Biden lost that policy dispute as Obama ultimately ordered a surge of new troops into Afghanistan and extended the war by way of his term in workplace, which ended in 2017.
But Biden is now in charge at the White House and he is overseeing a close to-total troop withdrawal regardless of the objections of some military authorities, Democratic and Republican lawmakers and humanitarian officials.
Biden’s Republican predecessor, Donald Trump, struck a deal with the Taliban below which all U.S. troops would leave by May of this year. Sources say Biden worried that reneging on that deal would court additional attacks on US troops and extend the war.
Biden acknowledged on Thursday that a new civil war could erupt in Afghanistan, but reiterated his commitment to pulling out US troops. While the United States will sustain diplomatic and humanitarian help for Afghans, Biden mentioned their future was up to them.
It was the Democratic president’s most public work however to reassure Americans on the Afghanistan tactic as the Taliban requires more than swaths of a nation at the precipice of chaos.
“I made the decision with clear eyes,” Biden mentioned. “I will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation of achieving a different outcome.”
About 2,400 US service members have been killed in America’s longest war – and several thousands more wounded.
A majority of Americans help Biden’s choice to move troops out of Afghanistan, according to an Ipsos poll from April, but only 28% of respondents agreed the United States achieved its objectives in Afghanistan, although 43% mentioned the US withdrawal now aids al Qaeda.
No Guarantees
Critics, such as some US government officials, warn the withdrawal is occurring with out guarantees that the Taliban will participate in a peace procedure or democratic elections, or reduce ties with al Qaeda.
The Pentagon says the withdrawal of US forces is 90% comprehensive, and the Taliban has launched an offensive taking locations exactly where it had as soon as been kept at bay. On Thursday, it captured a significant border crossing with Iran.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who accompanied Biden on the 2009 Afghanistan trip, mentioned this week that al Qaeda could re-emerge in Afghanistan and lay the groundwork for an additional attack on the United States. “It is not in America’s national security interest for the Taliban to take over Afghanistan.”
Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, mentioned she is “deeply concerned” by situations in Afghanistan.
Heather Barr, an interim co-director of the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch who spent years in Afghanistan, also had a grim assessment: “It feels like a complete disaster, as if the country is collapsing.”
The choice to leave was not quick, but existing and former aides mentioned Biden’s issues about receiving bogged down in Afghanistan started in the final stages of the George W. Bush administration and crystalized more than the years.
The 2009 trip persuaded him that the policy was failing.
“What he saw and heard on the trip,” Obama wrote in his 2020 memoir, “A Promised Land,” “convinced him that we needed to rethink our entire approach” and that Afghanistan was a “dangerous quagmire.”
Biden was in some cases the only senior White House official opposing troop surges to back the counterinsurgency tactic.
Yet the years that passed only sharpened Biden’s issues and these of close aides, such as Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
The 2011 killing of bin Laden, in a US raid that Biden was skeptical of in neighboring Pakistan, was a significant accomplishment for Obama. But it also removed an additional purpose for the United States to sustain a powerful presence in the area.
“Biden argued throughout the process, and would continue to argue, that the war was politically unsustainable at home,” Robert Gates, a defense secretary below Obama who clashed with Biden, mentioned in a 2014 memoir.
Biden’s administration hopes it can sustain some leverage more than the Taliban in US-backed peace talks with threats to withhold monetary help that the poor, landlocked nation requirements.
Yet the swift exit dangers providing the Taliban totally free rein. Blinken told Reuters for the duration of the 2020 presidential campaign that Trump’s error was agreeing to leave Afghanistan although extracting nothing at all in return from the Taliban.
“We better make sure that we say we’re drawing down but in exchange for actions from the Taliban that we’re seeking as opposed to pulling out for nothing in return.”
A bipartisan group of lawmakers and help groups share the concern that Biden’s personal strategy now is insufficient.
“Every time I’ve asked the administration for their plan on any of these issues, I’m told: ‘It’s coming,'” mentioned Republican Representative Mike Rogers, his party’s senior member on the House Armed Services Committee. “These poor decisions, I’m afraid, will require our return to Afghanistan in the near future.”
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