In a post-facto justification of his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden last Monday night said he felt vindicated by the capitulation of the country’s security forces to the Taliban. “The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight,” he said. “… American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”
Biden’s argument was both disingenuous and dishonorable.
Leave aside for a moment the ignoble suggestion that a country deserves to be abandoned if its soldiers don’t stand up to an aggressor. The fact is that Afghanistan’s police and security forces have been fighting and dying to protect their people – as well as the American soldiers and civilians living and working among them – for two decades.
More than 66,000 Afghan soldiers and police have paid the ultimate price. Hundreds of thousands have been injured, many of them for life. There is no accounting for how many of these casualties are a direct consequence of decisions made by the U.S. military and political leadership. In roughly the same period, coalition forces suffered about 3,500 deaths.
No less important is the American culpability in the failures of the Afghan security forces. It was the U.S. military, in the main, that recruited and trained the police and soldiery, which on paper number around 350,000. The Afghan military, cast in the American mold, was set up to fail, as Adm. James Stravidis has persuasively argued. Little thought was given to local conditions or the nature of the enemy.