(Casey Harper, The Center Square) This week will mark the three-year anniversary of President Joe Biden’s chaotic and deadly withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
Biden committed on the campaign trail to withdraw U.S. troops, a move supported by his predecessor Donald Trump, but the process left 13 U.S. service members killed and the country within the hands of the Taliban.
The Taliban also received billions of dollars in U.S. military equipment because it was left behind.
Federal officials have pointed to an effort to render that equipment unusable, but the rapid collapse in the country left little time to actually finish and accomplish that destruction of equipment.
The Taliban held a military parade featuring U.S. military equipment earlier this month.
“What added insult to injury to all of this was the way in which it was conducted, the unnecessary impetus behind it which led to the … collapse” and even “armed our adversaries,” Robert Greenway, a former top intelligence and national security official in the U.S. government for decades who is now at the Heritage Foundation, told The Center Square.
He added that Biden left them “as the best armed terrorist state in the history of the world.”
An eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan has long been on the table as a possibility for both parties, but letting the country fall back into the hands of the Taliban was at one time considered unthinkable and eventually became expected by many experts.
“The Taliban never really had entirety of control over Afghanistan,” Greenway said. “This is the closest they’ve been to it.”
But he added that that grip is “tenuous” and “devolving.”
In the July before the withdrawal, Biden said that Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was “not inevitable and that he trusted Afghanistan’s government.
“It’s a – it’s a silly question,” Biden continued, when asked by a reporter if he trusts the Taliban. “Do I trust the Taliban? No. But I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more re- – more competent in terms of conducting war.”
Afghanistan fell into the Taliban’s hands almost immediately, something intelligence and security experts predicted.
Greenway said the Taliban has called on the “faithful” to return to Afghanistan, which increases the threat to the U.S. homeland. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. were planned and launched from Afghanistan.
“Ultimately means a regional threat but more importantly means a threat against the U.S. homeland is on the march and actively coalescing,” Greenway said.
Greenway said Afghanistan’s Taliban takeover affects the Iran, Israel and Hamas conflict “a great deal.”
The loss of presence in Afghanistan has removed a sort of regional forward operating base across the world by which to act quickly in the Middle East, and that loss of deterrence leads to a more volatile region, Greenway said.
He also said the withdrawal sent a message to other powers like Russia, Iran and Ukraine that the U.S. didn’t have the will to act decisively and efficiently militarily, lowering the deterrence threat.
“I feel sorry for the people that are going to have to go back into Afghanistan when an attack happens on the U.S. homeland,” Greenway said.
Meanwhile, the U.S. armed forces are in a recruiting crisis, falling short of target recruitment goals across branches, something Greenway argues escalated after the Afghanistan withdrawal.
“If you don’t have confidence in leadership, in the commander in chief, you don’t have anything,” Greenway said.
Women in particular have suffered since the U.S. left, with the Taliban banning education for women over the sixth grade among other laws that essentially ban women from showing their faces or speaking loudly in public.
“Since 2021, the situation has worsened with the collapse of the economy and restrictions on women’s rights,” Gallup said in a release of a recent survey. “Gallup surveys have found that 96% of Afghan women are suffering under the Taliban, and most do not feel that women in Afghanistan are treated with respect.”
