Afghanistan: An elite failure

The last mistake responsible for the current state of events was the bungled withdrawal. After 20 years of failure, it was hard to argue that America had a vital reason to spend more lives and money on a botched effort. Once again, this current disaster was not inescapable. While this particular withdrawal has many shameful details, from the abandoned Afghan translators to a lack of meaningful counterterrorism options left after the fact, the worst is that it is predicated on a shambolic peace process with the Taliban.

Senior officials in both the Trump and the Biden administrations assured us that the Taliban could be dealt with to achieve an honorable peace. This was always a fiction. The regime that refused to bend in the 1990s is the same group that conquered Kabul today. Despite this obvious fact, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad allowed themselves to be gulled into thinking otherwise. Khalilzad promised that the peace process was “making strides” and that the Taliban would not overrun the country because they needed legitimacy. Even more foolishly, Pompeo, in an interview in March 2020, told the American people that the Taliban would cut ties and “destroy” al-Qaeda. This was simple wishcasting. Despite Secretary Antony Blinken’s lectures to the contrary, the Taliban clearly believed there was a military “solution” to the conflict. Moreover, earlier this year the U.N. Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team reported the obvious. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban remained joined at the hip. Biden-administration officials will insist they were bound by the ridiculous process started by the Trump administration, and former Trump officials will pretend their policy is somehow different from what is unfolding today. Neither deserve to be listened to.