According to reporting from Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their new book, “Peril,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken did his best to prevent the disaster over which the Biden administration presided in Afghanistan. Despite his early misgivings, America’s chief diplomat has since become a full-throated advocate for President Joe Biden’s patently calamitous Afghan policy. But in defending the indefensible, Blinken is sacrificing his reputation and tarnishing the administration he serves.
Blinken has the unenviable task of selling the American public on the necessity — indeed, inevitability — of the humiliating spectacle they were forced to witness in August.
Following a meeting with his counterparts from NATO nations in March, Blinken reportedly abandoned his support for a full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Central Asia. “His new recommendation was to extend the mission with U.S. troops for a while to see if it could yield a political settlement,” Woodward and Costa allege in their book. America’s allies were near unanimous in their belief that the United States should leverage its power to secure concessions from the Taliban and influence the formation of an interim government before leaving Afghanistan, and Blinken agreed. But Biden overruled him.
Now, Blinken has the unenviable task of selling the American public on the necessity — indeed, inevitability — of the humiliating spectacle they were forced to witness in August. That helps to explain why he’s turned in such an unconvincing performance.
“In April, we began drawing down our embassy, ordering nonessential personnel to depart,” Blinken said in testimony before members of Congress this week. This, along with the “19 specific messages” his State Department sent warning U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents to leave Afghanistan beginning in March, advances a craven claim: the suggestion that the estimated hundreds of U.S. citizens and permanent residents America left behind in Afghanistan have no one to blame but themselves.
But the administration spoke out of both sides of its mouth. As late as the first weeks of July, the president insisted that the “likelihood that there’s going to be a Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.” Meanwhile, the State Department-run embassy in Kabul assured those who depended on its services that the mission was “open and will remain open.” Moreover, the facility “has well-developed security plans to safely protect our personnel and facilities.” American citizens, permanent residents, and wartime allies are not at fault because they failed to understand these assurances were hollow.
“That emergency evacuation was sparked by the collapse of the Afghan security forces and government,” Blinken continued. “Even the most pessimistic assessments did not predict that government forces in Kabul would collapse while U.S. forces remained.” This doesn’t exculpate the Biden administration so much as indict it. If the administration’s intelligence assessments (which grew rapidly bleaker in July) indicated that Afghan forces could hold out against the Taliban offensive that had begun that spring with only approximately 700 U.S. troops remaining on the ground and without the American air, intelligence, and logistical support they’d come to rely upon, that is evidence of an incredible failure of imagination.
American citizens, permanent residents, and wartime allies are not at fault because they failed to understand these assurances were hollow.
But that’s the past. On Aug. 31, “The military mission in Afghanistan officially ended,” Blinken said, “and a new diplomatic mission began.” Beyond exfiltrating the many thousands of Americans, legal residents and wartime allies we left behind, that mission is focused on preventing Afghanistan from becoming an exporter of transnational Islamist terrorism again.
Toward that end, the Taliban have suddenly become our invaluable partners. “The Taliban has committed to prevent terrorist groups from using Afghanistan as a base for external operations that could threaten the United States or our allies, including Al Qaeda and ISIS-K,” the secretary of state declared.
This claim not only conflicts with the evidence of your own eyes but the Biden administration’s own assessments. “We are already beginning to see some of the indications of some potential movement of al Qaeda to Afghanistan,” Deputy CIA Director David Cohen testified in his own appearance before Congress on Tuesday. And the Taliban isn’t getting the band back together for the nostalgia value alone. “The current assessment probably conservatively is one to two years for Al Qaeda to build some capability to at least threaten the homeland,” Defense Intelligence Agency Director Scott Berrier agreed.
These assessments comport with the conclusion reached by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley that the Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan accelerates the threat to the U.S. homeland posed by terrorist actors in Central Asia. And it dovetails with the views of Barack Obama’s former intelligence chiefs.
“The reconstruction of Al Qaeda’s homeland attack capability will happen quickly, in less than a year, if the U.S. does not collect the intelligence and take the military action to prevent it,” former CIA Director Mike Morell warned. Leon Panetta agreed. The Taliban is “going to continue to support Al Qaeda,” he said, and “they will plan additional attacks on our country, as well as elsewhere.”
If the Taliban are dutifully seeing to America’s long-term national security interests, that is apparent only to Antony Blinken. Even if some elements of the administration’s withdrawal were suboptimal, Blinken is willing to concede that only within the implicit understanding that it is all the Trump administration’s fault. “We inherited a deadline; we did not inherit a plan,” Blinken said when gently guided by Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., in the direction of logic that would fault the Trump administration for Biden’s shambolic Afghan withdrawal. While both claims may be true, they are also entirely irrelevant. If the Taliban are dutifully seeing to America’s long-term national security interests, that is apparent only to Antony Blinken. Biden did inherit a deadline for withdrawal — a deadline toward which the Trump administration barreled with imprudent alacrity. But Biden summarily discarded that deadline in favor of a new one, which he renegotiated with the Taliban: Sept. 11, 2021. That, too, was eventually ditched and replaced with Aug. 31. Even if they were bequeathed a foolproof withdrawal plan by the Trump administration, they would have abandoned it in favor of one tailored to their own withdrawal date. And that’s just what the Biden White House did: crafted its own plan and stuck to it well after it became clear that it would produce a historic debacle. It was the Biden administration’s decision to draw down the U.S. footprint in Afghanistan to a skeleton presence before evacuating all civilian personnel. It was Biden who signed off on a plan to close the pivotal Bagram airbase in early July, leaving the U.S. to depend upon the indefensible civilian airport in Kabul and the “security” provided by the Taliban. It was the Biden administration’s decision to pull all U.S. support from Afghan forces, up to the private contractors who serviced the country’s own air force. It was the Biden administration’s decision to abandon the air campaign against the Taliban, which resumed four days after Trump struck his so-called deal with the group and which continued until Biden halted those strikes in May (only to resume them in late July when the Taliban surrounded the city of Kandahar, and by then it was far too late). And it was the Biden administration’s decision to leave Americans and our allies behind, abrogating his own pledge to stay until the last American had been saved. It may not have been a disaster of his own making, but the fiasco in Afghanistan is something Blinken apparently believes he needs to own. Posterity should give him his wish.
Noah Rothman
Noah Rothman is the associate editor of Commentary Magazine. 
