The buck stops with Biden on the Afghanistan withdrawal

Opinion editor's note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

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"For all this talk of chaos, I just didn't see it, not from my perch," John Kirby, spokesman for the National Security Council, defensively and defiantly said last week as the Biden administration released a report on the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

We saw it from our perch. So did the rest of the world, as desperate Afghan allies scrambled to board planes, some clinging to fuselage in a futile attempt to escape the Taliban's reconquest of the country.

And the chaos was surely apparent in the Kremlin, Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told an editorial writer. Roggio, who chronicled the conflict for FDD's "Long War Journal," said that he has "no doubt that the Russians perceived our weakness in Afghanistan. And that encouraged them to launch an invasion in Ukraine. It's not the only reason, but it contributed to their hubris, to think that it would be able to go into Ukraine unfettered. Perceptions matter."

They matter here, too. And the perception left by the report, and Kirby's defense of it, is that the Biden team is mostly blaming the Trump administration and not owning up to the mistakes made on its watch.

To be sure, President Joe Biden inherited an extraordinarily difficult situation from former President Donald Trump. Much of the 12-page report details decisions made by Trump that impacted actions by Biden, whose choices, the report states, "for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor."

As examples, it says that when Trump took office there were 10,000 troops in Afghanistan, but by the time Biden took over there were only 2,500. Trump had also signed an accord with the Taliban, known as the Doha Agreement, that committed to a U.S. withdrawal by May of 2021 in exchange for the Taliban taking part in a peace process and refraining from attacking U.S. troops and threatening major Afghan cities. As part of the deal, Trump also agreed to release 5,000 Taliban fighters from prison.

These, and many other details, especially about a concurrent drawdown of diplomatic staff needed to process the thousands of Afghans who rightfully expected to be protected for siding with the Americans, may be a damning indictment of Trump's complicity in what would become a deadly debacle for scores of Afghans unable to escape, including 170 killed, along with 13 U.S. service members, in a Taliban suicide bombing at the airfield.

Tragically, the carnage continues. And it's especially perilous for what Roggio estimates are hundreds of thousands of Afghans who were left behind, despite heroic efforts by U.S. troops and diplomats to average nearly 23 flights a day for 17 days out of the country.

But it wasn't enough, which makes this a moral as much as a military failure that may inspire hesitation the next time America looks to locals to support U.S. troops.

To the degree the Biden administration itself was held to account in the report it was mostly blaming intelligence agencies for underestimating the speed of the Taliban's takeover. But for the most part, Kirby said, the report's purpose wasn't accountability but "understanding."

So much for "The Buck Stops Here."

Among the few acknowledgments of lessons learned is that "We now prioritize evacuations when faced with a degrading security situation. We did so in both Ethiopia and Ukraine." But the report doesn't delve into the disaster's broader implications, including the reality that the U.S. fundamentally did not understand Afghanistan. Nor does it seek to explain why the world's most powerful country couldn't avoid a 2021 Kabul echo of 1975 Saigon.

Four presidents, two Republican and two Democratic, made mistakes regarding Afghanistan. But Biden was president at the time of the withdrawal, and however politically and militarily difficult, he should have chosen to better address the deficits the administration believes were created by the Trump administration before beginning the withdrawal.

"President Biden, as the commander in chief, may have inherited a messy situation," Roggio concluded. "But the outcome of that situation, the outcome of the withdrawal — he made the decision to leave, and he dictated how the U.S. would leave, and he owns the consequences of that decision."

And for many, the consequences weren't just chaotic, but catastrophic.