David Rothkopf is a foreign policy wise man and voluble commentator with a big audience. His recently published case for the defence, beginning with the line, ‘The intellectual dishonesty that we have seen in critiques of Biden’s handling of the exit from Afghanistan has been spectacular’, has been viewed by tens of thousands of people.
Mr Rothkopf deserves some credit for accentuating the positive. But, is he being honest? Where you stand on that question depends on where you sit. Better if it’s as far away as possible from the ‘chaos’ in Kabul or the sweltering holding pens in Qatar where refugees are starving themselves in order to avoid having to enter the few toilets made available to them.
Put another way, can he cite any Afghan support for his stance?
If readers are weary of Afghanistan polemic, please stop reading and move along. (Talleyrand shall do the same in good time, that’s a promise.) For others, what follows is a textbook case of fallacious argument. Mr Rothkopf’s words appear in italics.
1. Biden owns this. (No. The authors of 20 yrs of war own this. The corrupt Afghan govt & the Afghan military who stood down own this. The Trump Admin that set the deadlines, drew down the troops, left behind the materiel & released 5000 Taliban own this.)
Reply: Depends what you mean by ‘this’. Biden has insisted several times that the buck stops with him.
2. Well, at least he owns the chaos surrounding our exit. (No. There’s no way that the Taliban regaining control would not have led to chaos w/many thousands of Afghans seeking to escape the rule of a thug regime. Whenever we started airlifting folks out, it would’ve started.)
Reply: ‘There’s no way…’ is a prediction based on what body of evidence? So, for that matter, is ‘regaining control’. There are a number of possible, alternative scenarios where control would have been shared, partitioned, phased in, etc. For a contrary and equally subjective take on the ‘thug regime’ which the US gov’t has been doing business with for some time, see this account by Cheryl Benard, the wife of Zalmay Khalilzad.
3. Well, at least he should have been better prepared for the chaos. (Ok. I’m gonna give you this one. But having said that, efforts to prepare were rebuffed. The Afghan gov’t did not want the US beginning mass evacuations for the reasons cited above.)
Reply: Preparing and implementing are different things. Did the Afghan government have a veto on US planning and preparation?
4. The US could have given those in jeopardy more warning. (No. We began discussing leaving seriously 12 yrs ago. Trump announced he wanted out when he ran & signed a deal w/an earlier deadline last yr. Biden ran saying he would leave. State warned people to leave in April.)
Reply: This sounds like a red herring. The ‘chaos’ you cited above only began once the USA itself began leaving, not when it said it would leave. Obviously, many people must have assumed the warnings were unserious.
5. The US abandoned our allies. (No. Some of those allies left before we did. Others were well aware of US discussions re: departure, knew of the Trump deal. And there has been close coordination with allies throughout this evacuation process.)
Reply: A he-said, she-said problem here. The allies are all saying something very different.
6. The evacuation was bungled. (No. It started off badly. But it is still under way. It is currently one of the biggest airlifts in human history and within hours we will pass 100,000 safely flown out of Kabul. Actually, it has turned out to be a masterful logistical feat.)
Reply: You’re only reporting part of the story. The disorder and deaths just outside the airport are another textbook case: of how an evacuation should not be done. As to ‘masterful’, surely you will admit that seeing tens of thousands of people become refugees is not something to praise, yes? Their mental scars will last several lifetimes. And you don’t mention the millions who were not ‘safely flown out’.
7. Taliban control of Afg will make it a potential breeding ground for terror again. (There was no scenario in which they didn’t gain control. The US has many means to respond to terror threats. Despite US military presence in Afg. the Taliban steadily gained ground for years.)
Reply: More speculation. On what evidence is the first claim based? Or the second? As to the third, several people, such as the DCI, whose job it is to know, have said those means have been much hindered. Finally, the fact of and reasons for the fourth claim, as already noted, are contested.
8. People will be left behind. (It is wildly unrealistic to think the US could remove everyone at risk from Afg. What’s being done is above and beyond expectations. Other forms of political, diplomatic & economic pressure must be used to promote human rights in Afghanistan.)
Reply: The first statement, as also noted, finally, is true. What case of intellectual dishonesty does it assert or refute? The rest is subjective – retrospectively and prospectively.
9. We could easily have left troops there indefinitely. (No. There was a cost to that and a risk. The risk grew as the Taliban grew in strength. Trump accelerated that with the release of prisoners and his announced departure. Staying would have required a bigger investment.)
Reply. ‘Could have left’: yes, but probably costly and maybe risky, as you say. There may also have been a benefit. But once again, what is the evidence for your speculative certainty?
10. But we have left troops in Germany and Korea. (Not comparable. Those are allied nations facing real imminent threats from major enemies who pose a strategic risk to the United States. We have no similar on-going interest in Afghanistan.)
Reply: A judgement call that casts a rather narrow net around risks, threats, and interests. One could just as well argue that a conflict over Afghanistan and its environs involving a nuclear-armed Pakistan, China, Russia, India, and (probably) Iran someday could involve all three for the United States and its allies. The forward deployment of troops for the purpose of stability is akin to an insurance policy. Not a panacea with a 1-2 year time-frame. Yes, that is different from saying the residual US force in Afghanistan was failing to provide stability. But there again, does withdrawing it now allow for more stability? Would raising the numbers instead to those now implementing the withdrawal have done so? Nobody has real answers to these questions, certainly not without evidence. At the very least, you should admit the point, which is that some speculation just sounds better to some people. That’s what you’re really asserting. Not facts or analysis based on fact.
11. But the troops could have protected women and girls. (First, as noted, the Taliban was gaining strength for years--despite the presence of the troops. Second, troops are not the means we advance such interests anywhere else. It is not a sustainable or effective approach.)
Reply: define ‘strength for years’. The Taliban ‘regained control’ when the USA finally started leaving in earnest. There were alternatives, or so say some Afghans, who ought to know. As to the second part, yes, nobody ought to sustain gender protections by the gun. But, do you not admit that it and other kinds of protection have been, at least momentarily and necessarily, ‘effective’ in some instances? Would those girls have been able to enter a school in Little Rock without their National Guard chaperones?
12. But Biden says human rights are at the center of our foreign policy. (That can be true without deploying troops to confront all threats to rights. It must be. Because we’ll never do that. Are critics suggesting deployments now to Ethiopia? Myanmar? To protect women elsewhere?)
Reply: This is another red herring. The thread is about the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. See below.
13. It’s not about getting out of Afghanistan. That’s a distraction from the issue at hand. (No. It is about getting out of Afghanistan. It is about ending a 20 yr war. It is about acknowledging a massive US foreign policy failure & shifting to new priorities. That’s the point.)
Reply: Unclear what you mean here. Are you saying two wrongs make a right? Or the ends justify the means?
14. Biden was part of the problem, he’s known about this all along. (No. Biden has been arguing to wind this down for 12 years. His view was over-ruled by President Obama. And after 9/11 almost everyone supported going in after Al Qaeda. For good reason.)
Reply: Untrue. Biden was one of the most passionate defenders of nation-building when the decisions were made in 2001-2002, and a co-sponsor of the legislation that paid for it. It’s true that he changed his mind when public opinion shifted. But he has lied in the past couple of weeks about having done so. This elision, in turn, advances a contradiction following from your first point: Biden had no real choice and Biden made the right choice when he did.
15. But...but...it’s messy and painful. (As @stephenwertheim has pointed out. You can’t lose a war and make it look like you’ve won. Getting out was right. Some chaos was inevitable. The airlift is a major logistical achievement.)
Reply: To quote the late, lamented Mr Rumsfeld: ‘Stuff happens’.