BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Hill

Robert Gates, who served as defense secretary under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, wrote in a 2014 memoir that Joe Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” President Biden’s surrender of Afghanistan to the terrorist Taliban vindicates Gates’s grating assessment.

By spurning the advice of his civilian and military advisers, Biden must shoulder the blame for the international humiliation wrought on the United States by the terrorist capture of Afghanistan. There was no strategic or domestic imperative for Biden to order a hasty and total pullout of the U.S. force that had been drastically cut, as he admitted over the weekend, to the “bare minimum of 2,500” before his predecessor, Donald Trump, left office. 

The small U.S. force could have been easily sustained with relatively modest cost and little risk to American lives. Not a single American soldier had been killed in fighting in the past more than a year and a half, essentially because only Afghan soldiers were on the frontlines since the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan ended on Jan. 1, 2015. The residual U.S. force was essentially playing a supporting role.

Yet Biden rebuffed his top military commanders’ advice in April and ordered all American troops to rapidly return home. Biden also ignored the report of the bipartisan Afghanistan Study Group that recommended a conditions-based withdrawal while warning that a hurried, unconditional military exit would “leave America more vulnerable to terrorist threats” and have “catastrophic effects in Afghanistan and the region.”

In fact, an unclassified version of the U.S. intelligence community’s global threat assessment had warned in April that, “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.”

Biden, however, refused to heed any advice suggesting caution or developing a transition plan for the Afghan forces, which for combat operations were highly reliant on U.S. and NATO capabilities — from intelligence and close air support to emergency logistics and medical evacuation.

The irony is that Biden was facing no public pressure to quickly end the Afghanistan War. Contrary to the myth that the U.S. was tired of the war, Gallup polling over the past 20 years repeatedly found Americans to be more supportive than opposed to that military entanglement. The sustained public support to the longest war in American history was in stark contrast to previous U.S. wars, including in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, during which the majority public opinion at some point turned unfavorable, giving rise to antiwar movements. 

It was only after Biden had effectively ended the Afghanistan War on July 1 (when U.S. forces secretly pulled out at night from the sprawling Bagram Airbase, which had long served as the staging ground for operations in the country) that an American partisan divide over the war became distinct. In a July 6-21 Gallup poll, 47 percent of Americans (the vast majority of them Democrats) said the war was a mistake, while 46 percent said it wasn’t.

If there was any imperative for a rushed withdrawal, it was Biden’s woolly-headedness to honor a one-sided U.S. deal with the Taliban that Trump had bequeathed. The Taliban, Pakistan’s longstanding proxies whose brutal attacks over the years made them the world’s deadliest terrorists, had been openly violating the deal, so Biden’s sticking to it made little sense.

Indeed, Biden’s clinging to a blighted deal seriously compounded a U.S. pattern of undermining the elected Afghan government, including striking a deal with the Taliban behind Kabul’s back and then forcing Afghan authorities to release 5,000 jailed Taliban terrorists (a number equivalent to the size of two U.S. army brigades or regiments). The freed terrorists helped spearhead the latest onslaughts. 

If Biden did not want to retain 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, he could have reduced their number to just 1,000 to provide critical air support and reassurance to Afghan forces. That would have averted the disaster that has unfolded. But Biden, seeking to imprudently safeguard a deal that had already been wrecked by the Taliban, ruled that option out.

Last week, as one Afghan city after another fell to the Taliban and several senators and retired generals urged the White House to immediately employ military might to halt the terrorist militia’s further advances, Biden issued a statement on Saturday that proved the final nail in the coffin for a secular Afghanistan. By confirming that his dumping of the Afghan government was irrevocable, the statement led to President Ashraf Ghani’s escape from Afghanistan and the fall of Kabul.

This background illustrates how U.S. actions unwittingly aided and abetted the terrorist capture of strategically located Afghanistan. As Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) put it, it is the Biden administration’s execution of the Trump-initiated exit strategy that “clearly, by any measure, has been a dramatic failure and stain on the United States.”

When the Taliban was previously in power, from 1996 to 2001, its brutal record, including destroying historic and cultural artifacts, evoked some of the horrors perpetrated by Cambodia’s China-backed ultra-communist Khmer Rouge between 1975 and1979. The Taliban’s reestablishment of a jihadist, theocratic dictatorship in Kabul will likely destabilize the region and come to haunt U.S. security.

Biden, the oldest American to ever assume the presidency, has lived up to the adage, “Act in haste, repent at leisure.” In doing so, he has undermined America’s international credibility. The U.S. may not be able to recoup from the latest debacle.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Afghanistan is turning out to be U.S. President Joe Biden’s first foreign-policy disaster.

Ending America’s 20-year war there made sense, but the sudden and poorly planned U.S. military exit has facilitated the Taliban’s rapid advances, which have included the capture of a string of provincial capitals. The Taliban, long-standing proxies of Pakistan, have already managed to expand their control to two-thirds of the country, leaving the Afghan government in Kabul teetering on the brink, with its forces retreating from rural areas to defend cities.

The hasty exit order is especially foolhardy given that Mr. Biden, who has been quick to overturn many of his predecessor’s actions, is honouring Donald Trump’s one-sided deal with the Taliban. The U.S. could have quit Afghanistan without getting into bed with the world’s deadliest terrorists and thereby undermining the security of the country and the region. Instead, by following in Mr. Trump’s footsteps in Afghanistan, the White House has undercut U.S. leverage by vacating all its bases there, leaving the administration to chant the mantra that “there’s no military solution in Afghanistan” – even as the Taliban demonstrate in blood and territory that one indeed exists.

The geopolitical fallout from the Taliban’s success in forcing out Americawill extend far beyond Afghanistan. By signifying U.S. defeat, it will energize and embolden other terrorist groups in the global jihadist movement. If the Taliban seize Kabul, they are likely to declare an Islamic caliphate, as they did in 1996, when they seized power and ruled brutally until the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.

Make no mistake: The disaster in Afghanistan is unfolding just the way top U.S. generals had forewarned in the event of a hurried U.S. exit. But Mr. Biden overruled them in April and ordered all U.S. troops home. Now, the chickens are coming home to roost.

The U.S. has launched air strikes, but they have failed to halt the Taliban’s ruthless offensive. With the situation on the ground increasingly dire, many embassies in Kabul have advised their nationals to flee Afghanistan before commercial flight operations cease. Canada is bringing in Afghans who assisted the Canadian military’s mission in the country.

When Mr. Biden took office, there were just 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, compared with more than 100,000 at the height of the war. After the U.S. combat role ceased at the end of 2014, U.S. financial costs and casualties dramatically plummeted. In the period since, Afghan security forces have lost tens of thousands of men while the Americans suffered just 99 fatalities, including in non-hostile incidents.

Mr. Biden could have left behind a small residual force to provide critical air support and reassurance to Afghan forces in a cost-effective way. This would have prevented the security and humanitarian nightmare that is now developing. But the President, seeking to safeguard a deal that the Taliban had already been violating, ruled that option out.

Clinging to a blighted deal, Mr. Biden has compounded a Trump-initiated pattern of undermining the elected Afghan government, including Mr. Trump’s actions in striking a deal with the Taliban behind Kabul’s back and then forcing Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to release 5,000 jailed Taliban terrorists, many of whom are now in the vanguard of the latest onslaughts. Just before Mr. Biden’s withdrawal decision was announced, a leak of his administration’s draft peace proposal revealed that he sought to replace Mr. Ghani with a transitional government in which the Taliban held half of all positions – which only further emboldened them.

The primarily ethnic-Pashtun Taliban have now stepped up their campaign of targeted killings while seeking to militarily oust Mr. Ghani’s government. Their capture of key cities in the north – dominated by ethnic-minority groups – is part of a strategy to forestall the re-emergence of the “Northern Alliance,” whose ground operations aided U.S. air power in overthrowing the Taliban regime in 2001.

The Taliban’s brutal record in power, including destroying historic and cultural artifacts, evoked some of the horrors perpetrated by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. A recent United Nations Security Council report said the Taliban and al-Qaeda “remain closely aligned” and co-operate through the Pakistani-based Haqqani Network, known as an arm of Pakistani intelligence.

The Taliban’s swift advances raise the spectre of a reconstituted extremist emirate emerging in Kabul – one that is likely to deliver the rebirth of global terror. And just as the rise of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq led to U.S. reintervention, a Taliban emirate in Kabul will likely trigger the same awful cost eventually – which would only affirm Mr. Biden’s decision as a historic blunder.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

US military exit is likely to become Beijing’s strategic gain

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

China has long shielded Pakistan from international pressure over its harboring of terrorist groups, including blocking United Nations Security Council sanctions against Pakistani terrorists and opposing moving its close ally from the gray to black list of the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, the global terrorist-financing watchdog. In fact, China has often praised Pakistan’s commitment to the fight against terrorism.

But after nine of its dam engineers were killed this month in a terrorist-triggered bus explosion in Pakistan, China changed its tune. It has demanded that Pakistan, in the words of Premier Li Keqiang, “use all necessary means” against terrorists and bring “the perpetrators to justice.” Beijing has squarely blamed America’s “hasty withdrawal” from Afghanistan for creating cross-border volatility and insecurity.

The U.S. must be stopped, according to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, from “creating more problems and dumping the burden on regional countries.” The U.S. effectively ended its 20-year Afghanistan War on July 1 when it secretly pulled out at night from the sprawling Bagram Air Base, which had long served as the staging ground for operations in the country.

In private, Chinese officials cannot be unhappy with the exit of a defeated America. It not only opens greater space for China’s expansionism but also shows how U.S. power is in decline.

The bus explosion, however, has made China realize that the fallout from the deteriorating Afghanistan situation threatens its regional interests. Wang has proposed that Pakistan — the largest recipient of Chinese financing under President Xi Jinping’s marquee Belt and Road Initiative — collaborate with Beijing when it comes to Afghanistan and help “defend regional peace together.”

The fallout offers China a rationale for exploiting the void in Afghanistan — and the country’s vast mineral wealth. In addition, Afghanistan’s location at the crossroads of Central, South and Southwest Asia makes it geopolitically attractive for Beijing, which wants to link Kabul with the Belt and Road’s flagship project, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.

Advancing such interests hinges on violence abating in Afghanistan, which explains why Xi has called for a political solution to the country’s long-standing conflict.

China’s strategic ambitions, however, underscore a jarring paradox. Beijing views Islamic extremism as a pressing threat and, in the largest mass incarceration of people on religious grounds since the Nazi era, is holding more than a million detainees in a Muslim gulag. Yet it has built cozy ties with the Taliban, the marauding Islamist force created in the mid-1990s by Pakistani intelligence to help Pakistan call the shots in Afghanistan.

Atheist, communist China has for more than half a century been close to Pakistan, the first Islamic republic of the postcolonial era. Likewise, it has become strange bedfellows with the Taliban, responsible for the world’s deadliest terrorist attacks. Such is the transactional approach that has long been a hallmark of Chinese foreign policy.

When the Taliban seized power in 1996 and declared an Islamic caliphate, China established a closer relationship with the regime than any other non-Muslim country, launching flights between Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi and Kabul. On the same day two airplanes crashed into New York’s World Trade Center in 2001, visiting Chinese officials signed an agreement for greater economic and technical cooperation with the Taliban.Security guards stand at the gates of what is officially known as a vocational skills education center in Huocheng County in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. © Reuters

After the Taliban was ousted from power by a U.S.-led military invasion, Beijing quietly maintained ties with the militia in Pakistan, where the Taliban leadership took refuge. To this day, the Taliban’s top leaders remain ensconced in Pakistan, even as their fighters make gains on the ground in Afghanistan.

Much is being made of the potential for the Afghan conflict to spill over into Xinjiang. But just as China’s secure borders have for years forestalled any trouble in Xinjiang from growing jihadism in Pakistan, intensifying conflict in Afghanistan is unlikely to affect stability in China’s far west. China’s short, 76-km frontier with Afghanistan comprises mainly impassable high-altitude terrain.

China already has thousands of its own troops in Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir, which borders Xinjiang. It also has deployed its own military units in another potential corridor to Xinjiang, Tajikistan, including soldiers on the Tajik-Afghan border.

As the bus explosion illustrates, China’s concerns are essentially centered on its economic interests in Pakistan and Central Asia — especially resource-rich Tajikistan — and the safety of Chinese nationals working on projects there. The threat of terrorism, however, provides a convenient cover for Beijing to advance its geopolitical interests.

With the U.S. in retreat, China is likely to increase its strategic footprint in Afghanistan by leveraging its strategic relationship with the Taliban’s main backer, Pakistan, and its own long-standing ties with that militia.

To co-opt the Taliban, China has already dangled the prospect of providing the militia the two things it needs to govern Afghanistan in whole or in part — acquiescence to its rule, if not formal recognition, and much-needed infrastructure and economic development assistance. And the Taliban, rising to the bait, is going out of its way to assuage China’s concerns. Clearly, a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan will not only be under Pakistan’s sway but also greatly aid China’s designs.

America’s exit has opened the path for an opportunistic China to make strategic inroads into Afghanistan and deepen its penetration of Pakistan, Iran and Central Asia.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”

Former US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote in 2014 that Joe Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades.” The hasty US withdrawal from Afghanistan is set to extend that pattern.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

Afghanistan is on the brink of catastrophe, and it is US President Joe Biden’s fault. By overruling America’s top generals and ordering the hasty withdrawal of US troops, Biden opened the way for Taliban terrorists to capture more than a quarter of Afghanistan’s districts. Now, the Taliban is pushing toward Kabul, and the United States is looking weaker than ever.

The US effectively ended its military operations in Afghanistan on July 1, when it handed over to the Afghan government the sprawling Bagram Air Base, which long served as the staging ground for US operations in the country. In fact, “handover” is too generous a description. In a sign of what is to come, US forces quietly slipped out of the base overnight after shutting off the electricity. The resulting security lapse allowed looters to scavenge the facilities before Afghan troops arrived and gained control.

Biden has vehemently defended his decision to withdraw, arguing that the US “did not go to Afghanistan to nation-build” and that “staying would have meant US troops taking casualties.” He has also stood by his rushed approach, insisting that “speed is safety” in this context. “How many thousands more of America’s daughters and sons are you willing to risk?”

The implication was clear: Questioning the wisdom of the US withdrawal is tantamount to supporting the endangerment of Americans. But it is Afghans who are really in jeopardy.

Recall the last time the US left a war unfinished: In 1973, it hastily abandoned its allies in South Vietnam. The next year, 80,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians were reportedly killed as a result of the conflict, making it the deadliest year of the entire Vietnam War. It is also worth noting that in 1975, the US effectively handed Cambodia to the China-backed ultra-communist Khmer Rouge, who went on to carry out unimaginable horrors.

Now, the US is leaving Afghans at the mercy of a marauding Islamist force – one with a long history of savage behavior. Already, the Taliban offensive has displaced tens of thousands of civilians. And while the Afghan government in Kabul teeters, the Taliban is seizing American weapons from the Afghan military and showing them off as they march across the country.

America’s justification for rushing out of Afghanistan is much weaker than its reasoning for leaving Vietnam. Whereas 58,220 Americans (largely draftees) died in Vietnam, only 2,448 US soldiers (all volunteers) died over the course of 20 years in Afghanistan. Moreover, since the US formally ended its combat mission on January 1, 2015, the US has suffered just 99 fatalities, including in non-hostile incidents. During the same period, more than 28,000 Afghan police officers and soldiers have been killed.

None of this is to minimize the blood and treasure the US has sacrificed in Afghanistan, let alone suggest that American troops should stay indefinitely. On the contrary, ending America’s longest war is a worthy goal. But Biden’s approach entails effectively admitting that a terrorist militia has defeated the world’s most powerful military, and then handing Afghanistan back to that militia. This undercuts global trust in the US, jeopardizes Afghan and regional security, and threatens to trigger a resurgence of terror worldwide.

The Taliban’s impending return to power will surely energize and embolden other terrorist groups in the larger global jihadist movement. Furthermore, the Taliban, a creature of Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence, still receives significant aid from Pakistan’s military. So, while Biden says that Afghanistan’s future is now in its own hands, it is actually mostly in Pakistani hands, as Afghan President Ashraf Ghani recently noted.

Among those facing the most acute risks is India. When the Taliban was last in power, from 1996 to 2001, it allowed Pakistan to use Afghan territory to train terrorists for missions in India. Its return to power could thus open a new front for terrorism against India, which would then have to shift its focus from intensifying military standoffs with China in the Himalayas.

The Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan helps China in other ways, too. Given that Pakistan is a Chinese client, the US withdrawal paves the way for China to make strategic inroads into Afghanistan, with its substantial mineral wealth and strategic location between Pakistan and Iran.

China would achieve this by offering the Taliban the two things it desperately needs: international recognition and economic aid. With Russia also likely to recognize the Taliban’s leadership in Afghanistan, the group will have little incentive to moderate its violence, despite its current attempts to polish its image.Sign up for our weekly newsletter, PS on Sunday

Biden had a better option: The US could have maintained a small residual force in Afghanistan, in order to provide critical air support and reassurance to Afghan forces. Yes, this would have violated the deal that Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, struck with the Taliban in February 2020. But the Taliban have already violated that Faustian bargain. Biden was happy to overturn many of Trump’s other actions, making his insistence on upholding this deal difficult to understand.

Biden says the US is “developing a counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability” that does not require a physical presence in Afghanistan. But if Afghan security continues to unravel, “over-the-horizon” operations will make little difference. The more likely scenario will be an emergency evacuation of US embassy personnel and other American citizens from Kabul, much like the evacuation from Saigon in 1975. India, for one, has already begun such an exodus, evacuating its consulate staff from Kandahar.

Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defense under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, wrote in 2014 that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades.” The hurried US withdrawal from Afghanistan is set to extend that pattern.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Asian Juggernaut; Water: Asia’s New Battleground; and Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis.

© Project Syndicate, 2021.