The Taliban patrol in the city of Herat took control in Herat, Afghanistan, on August 18, 2021, while the Taliban took control of Afghanistan after 20 years.
Mir Ahmad Firooz | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
At the end of the worst week of President Joe Biden’s young presidency, this is the question he must urgently answer: “Of all the problems that his decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan has generated, what is the more significant? “
Leave Washington’s hugely popular blame game for now on who is responsible for not anticipating the Taliban’s swift takeover and the collapse of the democratically elected Afghan government and its army. Or why the Biden administration did not better facilitate the safe evacuation of U.S. citizens and their endangered Afghan allies.
Over time it will be crucial to digest the lessons learned from our last twenty years in Afghanistan, so that we do not repeat the many mistakes that have been made. However, even this discussion must leave behind the urgency of addressing the immediate risks, their implications, and the decisions that could control the harm.
The most compelling answer to the question of what Biden “does not dare to ignore” in Afghanistan falls into roughly three categories: the danger to Biden’s defining narrative “America is back,” the risks that they grow from questions about U.S. competition and commitment, likely terrorist resurgence along with the urgent need to decide whether to work with or against the Taliban.
The main existential threat to Biden’s most inspiring and reassuring narrative for allies and fellow democrats is that the U.S. is once again a reliable ally and partner, following the uncertainties that grew between them during the administration. Trump.
The consequences of this risk would outweigh all the others posed by the situation in Afghanistan at a time when Biden himself characterized it as a “turning point” in history, defined by a systemic dispute between democracy and autocracy.
“We are in the midst of a fundamental debate about the future and direction of our world,” Biden told a virtual audience reception on Feb. 21 at the Munich Security Conference, thanking him for this embrace of “allies.” “of the Allies after the cold shoulder of former President Donald Trump’s” America First “agenda.
“We are at a turning point,” Biden told them, “among those who argue that, given all the challenges we face, from the fourth industrial revolution to a global pandemic, that autocracy is the best way forward … and those who understand that democracy is essential, essential to meet these challenges “.
The danger now is that Biden will face another turning point, where Democratic allies’ doubts about the reliability of the United States will grow, where fragile Afghan democracy will become an unfriendly theocracy, and where opponents test the Washington resolution in places like Ukraine. Russians or Taiwan for China.
“At some point, the White House may not even remember its supporters in Kiev,” Nikolai Patrushev, Vladimir Putin’s top national security adviser, said in an interview. He added that Ukrainians should not trust Americans because one day they would abandon it as they did Afghanistan.
The Global Times, which often acts as a spokesman for the Chinese leadership, echoed the notion of unreliability in the United States in a Monday editorial: “Once a war breaks out in the Taiwan Strait, the island’s defense it will collapse in a few hours and the U.S. military will win I will not come to help. ”
Chinese state news agency Xinhua wrote: “After the blows of the global financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, the decline of American hegemony has become an indisputable reality. Its failure to l “Afghanistan is another turning point in this spiraling fall.”
Not surprisingly, Russia and China are making the most of Afghanistan in its psychological operations and propaganda. However, doubts among the strongest American allies are more troubling. Many of them had been deeply relieved by Biden’s choice. They now complain that their countries, some of which had troops in Afghanistan that depended on the American association, were not consulted before the announcement of Biden’s April troop withdrawal.
As disturbing as Trump’s rhetoric toward allies may be, his administration’s actions were often reassuring. The opposite is true in the case of the Biden administration, where the rhetoric has been reassuring but unsettling unilateral actions, said a European ambassador.
Lord George Robertson, who was NATO Secretary General when the alliance on September 12, 2001, first invoked Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, declaring that the terrorist attack a day earlier against the United States would be seen as an attack on the alliance’s 19 countries.
“There was a moment of unique solidarity,” he told the Atlantic Council on Friday. “I was proud of the organization I had the privilege of leading at the time. My feeling this week is the opposite. I’m not proud. I’m ashamed, because it seems like that solidarity is gone. The beginning of all of us is going to (to Afghanistan) together and we all go out together it seems like it’s completely lost. “
He talked about how everything that has been achieved over the last two decades was at risk: the elimination of the terrorist threat, the education of women and girls, and advances toward, if not a Western democracy, toward a more civilized and tolerant Afghan normalcy.
The solidarity of the alliance at that time, Lord Robertson said, “has been crushed by the unilateralism of the President of the United States, and I am sorry because I have known Joe Biden for many, many years and a man of wisdom and talent that is. But this act of recklessness has harmed and weakened NATO in ways that will be difficult for us to recover. “
In December, shortly after Biden’s election as president, I argued, “Joe Biden has the rarest opportunities history has to offer: the opportunity to be a transformative foreign policy president.
This was true because of Covid and its global economic threat. It was true because of the need to better manage relations with China. It was mostly true because the American allies were eager to turn the page on the Trump administration and restore the common cause among the major democracies.
It never struck me that Afghanistan might appear as the biggest obstacle to Biden’s ability to play this historic role. But this is where we are today.
Biden must bring competence and humanity to Afghan evacuation efforts. It must manage the consequences of the Taliban’s acquisition and possible terrorist threats, while facing China’s generational challenge and authoritarian resurgence.
It should begin by making it clear through actions, not just rhetoric, that it intends to work closely on all matters of common interest, whether within the framework of Chinese policy or the Taliban’s engagement, with the allies it neglected in leaving. of Afghanistan.
Frederick Kempe he is the president and CEO of Atlantic Council.