WASHINGTON/LONDON — In an interview Wednesday, President Joe Biden touched on the possibility that U.S. forces could stay in Afghanistan beyond the stated goal of Aug. 31 to evacuate all American citizens.
The departure from the original plan is one example how the administration is being forced to shift policies on the run, in large part due to vastly underestimating the speed of the Taliban advance.
“There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days,” Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Wednesday. Milley, the nation’s highest ranking uniformed officer who was also personally deeply involved in the Afghanistan War, was in effect admitting that the scenarios weighed by the military and intelligence community were too rosy.
This miscalculation lies at the root of the problems the U.S. faces today. “If there’s American citizens left, we’re gonna stay to get them all out,” Biden told ABC in the interview.
When Biden announced the withdrawal in April, there was an estimated 3,000 American troops deployed in the Central Asian country. But as of Wednesday, there were about 4,500 troops stationed at Kabul’s international airport. The plan is to send another 1,500 troops to secure the safety of the airport as Americans and Afghans who supported the mission are evacuated.
“What we’re hearing from the Biden administration is that they admit they thought they had more time,” Lisa Curtis, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told Nikkei. “They thought they had at least six months to process and get these people through the system. Nobody imagined that the Taliban would be able to take control of the country in one week’s time. So, they were caught off guard.”
In early July, the administration had announced that 90% of the withdrawal had completed. But efforts to move Afghans who supported the U.S. operations began only at the end of that month. The White House was moving under a calendar that presumed that the Afghan government would continue to control Kabul.
Now the August deadline hangs by a thread. There are about 80,000 Americans and Afghans subject to evacuation. Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby told reporters Wednesday that 18 American C-17 cargo planes had evacuated approximately 2,000 people in the last 24 hours. Biden has said that there would need to be 7,000 people evacuated a day to reach the August deadline. A senior defense official said the plan was to aim for 9,000 people a day as soon as possible.
Taliban checkpoints set up around Kabul are another concern. There are reportedly checkpoints on the road leading to the airport, with people being violently beaten back when they attempt to break through the checkpoint.
Asked if the U.S. military will help those stranded outside to get to the airport, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Wednesday that the main mission of the troops there was to secure the airport. “I don’t have the capability to go out and extend operations to Kabul,” he said.
Meanwhile, allies in Europe have expressed their frustration toward the chaos in Afghanistan.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks during a debate in Parliament on the situation in Afghanistan on Aug. 18.
In a House of Commons session on Wednesday, U.K. opposition leader Keir Starmer accused Prime Minister Boris Johnson of “staggering complacency” and “betraying” the Afghan people.
Even Johnson’s fellow Tory members were venting their frustration, with some directly slamming the American president. Tom Tugendhat, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee and a former officer in the intelligence corps in Iraq and then Afghanistan, said: “To see their commander in chief call into question the courage of men I fought with — to claim that they ran — is shameful. Those who have not fought for the colors they fly should be careful about criticizing those who have.”
Johnson pushed back that “no successful terrorist attacks against the West have been mounted from Afghan soil for two decades,” but that was the extent of his pushback.
In Germany, Norbert Rottgen, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the German Bundestag, called it a “major foreign policy failure” in Afghanistan on broadcaster ARD. The withdrawal of troops will have a long-term effect, as it significantly affects the reliability of the West, he said.
He also noted that the U.S. consultation with allies was insufficient.
The criticism is a blow to the Biden team, who had made trans-Atlantic relations a pillar of their foreign policy. The Afghanistan operations were a symbol of NATO cooperation, but the clumsy exit has driven a wedge in the alliance.
However, the reality is that the European side of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization can do little without the U.S.
No. 10 Downing St. said that Defense Minister Ben Wallace considered keeping British troops in Afghanistan along with other non-U.S. NATO allies after the U.S. withdrawal. But of the 132,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan at its peak, 90,000 were American. Even if alarmed by the U.S. withdrawal, it was difficult to continue the operation without the U.S.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is said to have been skeptical about the U.S. withdrawal, but in her phone call with Biden on Wednesday, she requested help in evacuating the Afghans who helped German troops. It was an acknowledgment that Germany alone cannot evacuate them all.
The situation in Afghanistan could trigger debates in Europe about the dangers of following the U.S. into conflicts.
“We will have to be prudent about new operations from here,” a senior member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany told Nikkei.
The Afghan operation saw the participation of most of the major Western countries but it did not succeed. Democracy did not take root. And while major spy agencies, such as Britain’s MI6 and Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) were actively collecting intelligence, none of them caught the rapid turn of events on the ground.
Without answers to these miscalculations, new deployment of troops will not win public support, the member said.