The facts on Afghanistan from a Minnesotan who was at the center of it all

Opinion editor’s note: Star Tribune Voices publishes a mix of commentary online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

The third anniversary of the suicide bombing in Kabul that killed 13 U.S. service personnel and 170 Afghan civilians amid the U.S. withdrawal became this week’s campaign flashpoint.

Former President Donald Trump blamed the Biden administration for the “humiliation in Afghanistan,” while a spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign claimed that “the Biden-Harris administration inherited a mess from Donald Trump.”

Meanwhile, a mess of protocol and politics arose from Trump’s photo-op at Arlington National Cemetery that was meant to honor the 13 fallen after a campaign aid allegedly pushed and verbally attacked an official trying to enforce a no-photo/no-video section of the sacred site.

By Friday it seemed that the controversy and contention had eclipsed the anniversary. Once again, Afghanistan itself became just an abstraction.

But for some, including native Minnesotan Ross Wilson, Afghanistan is not an abstraction. It’s a searing experience far more profound than petty presidential politics. So Wilson, who was America’s top — and for now, final — diplomat in Afghanistan, soberly shared in an interview the facts of how the fall of the Afghan government and capital culminated in chaos and casualties, including the 13 Americans, at Kabul’s airport as the country succumbed for the second time to Taliban rule.

Wilson, who’s now board chair at Global Minnesota, was asked by the Trump administration to come out of retirement to be deployed to Afghanistan after a distinguished diplomatic career that included ambassadorships in Turkey and Azerbaijan. He served the final 20 months of America’s 20-year post-9/11 involvement in the chronically troubled country.

First off, Wilson said, an off-ramp wasn’t sought just by Biden and Trump but prior presidents as well. Yet, he clarified, it was the Trump administration that agreed the U.S. would “withdraw all American forces by May 1, 2021, as part of a package that aimed to protect the gains Afghans made since 2001, as well as bring about an inter-Afghan agreement on the way forward.”

Trump’s “decision and the decisions of his predecessors to try to pursue negotiations reflected awareness that victory on the battlefield was not going to be possible, and that American public support for that battle was waning.”

The accord, continued Wilson, “proved extraordinarily difficult to implement. While the Talibs honored their commitment to cease attacks on American and Western security interests, they continued large-scale violence against Afghan security forces and Afghan citizens.”

Trump, Wilson said, “decided to accelerate the drawdown of American forces beyond what was required in the agreement, and talked publicly about completely withdrawing our forces by the end of his administration.”

Biden “inherited the commitment that President Trump had made to withdraw our forces and was faced with what I think was an extremely difficult choice that only he could make: To go ahead with the withdrawal on or about May 1, recognizing that there would be all kinds of problems, both for Afghans and for the United States, if we went ahead with that. Or, abandoning that commitment and running what I believed was a very high likelihood of resumed Taliban attacks on American and Western troops and diplomatic establishments.”

Biden moved the withdrawal date to Aug. 31, 2021. Overall, Wilson said, ”Two presidents separately determined that it was in our country’s interest to withdraw our forces from Afghanistan. And those of us who served in the military and at our embassy did everything we could to try to both implement the agreements and deal with the follow-on implications as best we could.”

As to the belief by some analysts that the U.S. should have maintained a residual force, Wilson commented that it would “not have been a cost-free thing, it would have been a costly thing. And I think in part for that reason President Trump made the decision, which I respect, to withdraw forces. And it’s why I respect the decision that President [Joe] Biden made to avoid similar kind of wide-ranging American casualties that would have caused a whole different set of problems for our interests in Afghanistan.”

The back-and-forth between Trump and Biden and now nominee Harris has focused on the presidential role in the tragic conclusion to America’s longest war. But perhaps it’s not American but Afghan presidents who deserve more scrutiny, from the feckless Hamid Karzai to the eventually absent Ashraf Ghani, who Wilson said fled without transferring power or even informing his two vice presidents or senior cabinet ministers. That left a “gaping hole” with Afghans, especially in Kabul, “deeply afraid of what Taliban rule would mean — and for good reason.”

So like their leader, Afghans themselves fled to the airport, paralyzing personnel tasked with protecting the perimeter and exacerbating the crisis by crowding onto the tarmac, making it impossible for some Air Force reinforcements to land to reestablish order. The chaos became a catastrophe, with some desperate Afghans futilely clinging to the fuselages of departing planes, creating scenes reminiscent of America’s desperate helicoptered exit out of Saigon some four decades earlier.

“The scene at the airport,” said Wilson, was “dystopian” and “like ‘Lord of the Flies.’

“It’s still very difficult for me personally to describe how ghastly that was,” said Wilson, with the difficulty apparent in his choked-off words.

For scores of Afghans, it was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to get out, Wilson said, adding that the embassy was overwhelmed by individual and institutional requests from Afghan and American governmental and societal sectors to evacuate Afghans, including interpreters, military aides, journalists, civil society leaders and others. “It was heart-wrenching,” Wilson said — and impossible to process in a timely manner. But the State Department dispatched as many diplomats as it could get into the country on an emergency basis. Working around the clock, Wilson and his fellow Foreign Service officers evacuated about 125,000 people in a two-week span — “a number without precedent,” Wilson said, “that reflects on our commitment that America made to its partners and allies in Afghanistan.”

But, he sadly added, “not all of them got out.”

Those envoys involved, he said, “can and do and should feel a lot of pain and agony as we look at what’s going on in Afghanistan now — a cratered economy, a deep repression of the rights of women and minorities — all of these things are to be pained about.” But he lauded the generational work of ensuring that more Afghans survive childbirth and of the role the U.S. played in educating young people — including, unlike the Taliban, girls and women.

“The majority of those people are still in Afghanistan,” Wilson said. “The wheels of life and politics will continue to turn in that country. It’s not a fixed state for the rest of time. I want to believe — do believe — that those wheels of life and wheels of politics will continue, will be able to play a role in shaping a better future for the people of that country.”

Three years ago on Saturday, Wilson, one of the last four remaining diplomats from what was once the world’s largest embassy, departed on “a very somber plane.”

Everybody “who was there is deeply proud of what they were able to do and deeply proud of what they tried to do, but also recognize[s] we weren’t successful,” Wilson said, before emotionally adding that “we all carry around the baggage of those who couldn’t get out, and remember and think about that. And that’s something we have to live with for the rest of our lives.”

They should be proud.

Including — indeed especially — Wilson himself.