There is no doubt in our hearts and minds that President Joe Biden, whose son fought in one of America’s post-9/11 wars, was torn when he announced that the U.S. plans to withdraw all of its fighting men and women from Afghanistan by Sept. 11 – the 20th anniversary of an unprecedented attack on our nation that claimed the lives of 2,977 innocent men, women and children.
Addressing the nation from the Treaty Room in the White House on April 14, the same room where President George W. Bush solemnly announced on Oct. 7, 2001, that the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had begun, Biden said: “I’m now the fourth United States president to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan: two Republicans, two Democrats. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth.”
We never minced words when it came to President Donald Trump’s determination to end America’s post-9/11 “forever wars” at seemingly any cost. And we will not mince words today. Biden’s decision to “end the forever war” in Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 2021, will, sadly, but almost certainly, come back to haunt his administration and the people of Afghanistan in ways reminiscent of America’s disastrous exit from Vietnam.
As we wrote last November when Trump announced his plans to precipitously withdraw all remaining troops from Afghanistan in his bid to seal a peace deal with the Taliban, “The harsh reality is that this is reminiscent of Vietnam and President Richard Nixon’s ‘peace with honor’ withdrawal from that war-torn nation which resulted in the shameful abandonment of our allies and a refugee crisis throughout Southeast Asia that eventually landed on the shores of America.”
Our concerns with Biden’s precipitous withdrawal, once again in a bid to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table, are similar. As we wrote in March, signing a peace deal with the Taliban “offers legitimacy to an organization best known for using a soccer stadium to carry out public torture and executions, for oppressing women and girls, for targeting the LGBTQ community, and for otherwise imposing an extreme and totalitarian ideology on the people of Afghanistan.”