Biden’s America has left Afghanistan to starve

Joe Biden is not a war criminal. He didn’t set out as a newly-elected President to slaughter his country’s enemies. He didn’t target women and children or any other innocent civilians. He didn’t order the destruction of schools and hospitals or the deliberate starvation of an entire people. Yet Biden’s impact on Afghanistan over the last six months would have been much the same if he had in fact been a genocidal maniac. 

Afghans today are starving. Children are dying on the streets of Kabul and other cities. In the mountains and on the plains, people are not only hungry, but freezing to death. What passes for the Government has no money. Almost all international aid has been cut off. “Moderates” – that is, Muslims who do not subscribe to the Islamist death cult – are being hunted down.  Bands of armed men roam the countryside, looking for apostates whom they can put to death, either by slitting their throats or with a burst of machine-gun fire. Schools everywhere are being closed. Women have been stripped of their rights as free-thinking citizens. They are no longer allowed to work outside the home. Girls as young as twelve are being forced into marriages with men three times their age who treat them as chattels. 

But in America, while all this is happening, Afghanistan has dropped out of the headlines as surely as Vietnam 12 months after the fall of Saigon in 1975. 

The received wisdom – dispensed by Biden and accepted by Democrats and Republicans alike – is that the US got out of Afghanistan last August after doing all it could over 20 years to create a safe and prosperous environment for its people. According to the White House, the blame for everything that has happened since the withdrawal can be laid squarely at the feet of the Taliban. 

Beyond that, until today, there was only silence. There was next to no criticism of the Administration for the horrors of present-day Afghanistan. The media, which expressed some disquiet at the time, had for the most part moved on. In Congress, such voices that were raised in protest have been largely drowned out by Senators and members of the House who, when they are not engaged in bitter domestic quarrels over spending and who won the 2020 presidential election, have reset their foreign compasses so that they point only to Russia, the Ukraine and China.

But this morning, in response to an appeal by some 40 House Democrats to release “a substantial share” of Afghan government funds frozen by order of the White House, the President said that if the Taliban released Mark Frerichs, an American aid worker and navy veteran, held hostage since 2020, consideration might be given to a review of the regime’s “aspirations for legitimacy”. 

“This is not negotiable,” he added.

I lived in the US for just short of 15 years and came to realise early on that the rest of the world is looked upon by most Americans much as the famous New Yorker cover viewed it back in 1976 – by no coincidence one year on from the nation’s humiliation in Vietnam. You will recall that after Ninth Avenue, things start to get vague, so that, beyond Los Angeles, Asia and Africa are mere heaps of mud on the distant horizon. Most tellingly perhaps, Europe is absent entirely from the picture. It is as if we had ceased to exist. 

And now, in 2022, we are witnessing the latest spasm of American disengagement, with isolationism once more the standard currency of diplomacy. It remains to be seen what response there might be to a Russian invasion of Ukraine or a takeover of Taiwan by China. But it is thought improbable that America’s still-mighty armed forces would intervene directly. High-profile fleet movements and “stringent” economic sanctions would be much more the order of the day. 

It would have been the same under Donald Trump and it could be little different under the next President, of whichever party. Biden, who told the world last June that “America is back,” was not telling the truth when he spoke. Indeed, it is clear that he was lying. 

Afghanistan has in the meantime been abandoned to its fate. We were told in the early days of the occupation that nation-building was not on the cards. Then it became obvious that it was. Between 2002, when the #1 Taliban were routed, and 2021, when they returned in their #2 format, the emphasis was on democratic institutions, economic reconstruction, education and the rights of women. The military drawdown was gradual and mirrored by a steady improvement in the (presumed) efficiency and dependability of native forces under the command of the government in Kabul. 

And then along came Biden. The new President, an old man in a hurry, had never favoured nation-building. He wanted America out of Afghanistan so that he could concentrate on his ambitious domestic agenda. He was warned, not least by his generals, that a wholesale withdrawal, carried out at speed, would spell disaster for everything that had been accomplished over the previous 20 years. But he wasn’t listening. 

The rest of the West, Britain included, folded like a bad hand of cards. If we felt ashamed, we chose not to say so, preferring to stress the fact that we had been left without any realistic alternative. 

Over an eight-week period that will live in infamy, every last American serviceman and woman, every last diplomat, every last counter-terrorism expert and every last US government adviser was airlifted out of the country. By August 30, one day ahead of schedule, the Taliban were in total control of the entire country. The Afghan Army was not so much defeated as left rudderless. Its Air Force found that its strike aircraft had been disabled, as were the fighting vehicles left behind by the retreating Marines. Ashraf Ghani, the elected President, was in no doubt what needed to be done. He got out within a matter of hours, taking with him millions of dollars in cash.  

There is no need here to go over the full, humiliating details of what took place or the desperate attempts by Afghans who had pledged their loyalty to America to get out alongside their erstwhile protectors. Suffice it to say that the final days, as in Saigon in 1975, were marked by unseemly chaos. It was not only America First, it was America Last. 

And so we are where we are. Afghanistan’s 40 million people have been left to their fate, and that fate is either to embrace jihad or else to die of hunger, cold, malnutrition and poverty – or both. 

Did Joe Biden know what he was doing? Possibly, possibly not. Perhaps he thought everything would go just fine and America could return home proud of what had been achieved ever since it went in to avenge the terrorist attacks of 9/11. He might even have supposed that the Taliban had learned their lesson and that they would govern their country with a firm but fair hand pending the restoration of some form of democracy. 

Either that or he just didn’t care.