[The muted American response to the Taliban siege shows in no uncertain terms that the U.S. war in Afghanistan is over.]
By Helene Cooper, Katie Rogers and Thomas Gibbons-Neff
But these are different times. What
aircraft the U.S. military could muster from hundreds of miles away struck a
cache of weapons far from Kunduz, Taliqan or Sari-i-pol, the cities that
already had been all but lost to the Taliban.
The muted American response on
Sunday showed in no uncertain terms that America’s
20-year war in Afghanistan is over. The mismanaged and exhausted Afghan
forces will have to retake the cities on their own, or leave them to the Taliban
for good.
The recent string of Taliban
military victories has not moved President Biden to reassess his decision
to end
the U.S. combat mission by the end of the month, senior administration
officials said Sunday. But the violence shows just how difficult it will be for
Mr. Biden to extract America from the war while insisting that he is not
abandoning the country in the middle of a brutal Taliban offensive.
In a speech defending the U.S.
withdrawal last month, Mr. Biden said the United States had done more than
enough to empower the Afghan police and military to secure the future of their
people. U.S. officials have acknowledged that those forces will struggle, but
argue they must now fend for themselves.
So far, the administration’s
sink-or-swim strategy has not shown promising results.
Over the past week, Taliban
fighters have moved swiftly to retake cities around Afghanistan, assassinated
government officials, and killed civilians in the process. Throughout this,
American officials have publicly held out hope that Afghan forces have the
resources and ability to fight back, while at the same time negotiating a peace
deal with the Taliban that seems more unlikely by the day.
Leon E. Panetta, who served as
defense secretary under President Barack Obama, said he had expected to see
more U.S. air support on Sunday, but he did not expect the situation would
improve markedly even with the help of American forces.
“Let’s face it,” Mr. Panetta said.
“The most you can hope for now is some kind of stalemate” between Afghan forces
and Taliban fighters, who have demonstrated little interest in reaching an
accord since the American troop withdrawal was announced.
At the Pentagon, where senior
leaders have reluctantly cut off most military support to Afghanistan,
officials were on phone calls Sunday about the unfolding events around Kunduz,
a city of more than 350,000 people. The United States has twice in the past
intervened to retake Kunduz from the Taliban.
But defense officials said there
were no plans to take action this time beyond limited airstrikes. Over the past
three weeks, the United States has used armed Reaper drones and AC-130 aerial
gunships to target Taliban equipment, including heavy artillery, that threaten
population centers, foreign embassies and Afghan government buildings,
officials said.
One official acknowledged that with
only 650 American troops remaining on the ground in Afghanistan, a concerted
air campaign was unlikely to undo the advances the Taliban had made.
Although the American military
mission will formally conclude at the end of this month, American troops and
their Western allies are mostly gone already. The U.S. handed
over Bagram Air Base — once the military’s nerve center — to the Afghans
last month, effectively ending major U.S. military operations.
Now, air support for the Afghan
forces and overhead surveillance arrives from outside the country, from bases
in Qatar or the United Arab Emirates, or from an aircraft carrier in the
Arabian Sea.
Wesley Clark, the former top NATO
general under President Bill Clinton, called the weekend’s events “a tragedy
for the people of Afghanistan, and a consequence of American misjudgments and
failures.”
Civilian casualties have
skyrocketed. Nearly 2,400 civilians have been killed or injured between May 1
and June 30, according to a United Nations report released last month,
the highest
number recorded for that period since monitoring began in 2009.
When asked about the Taliban’s
advances on Friday, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters
that Mr. Biden had long been prepared to make “difficult choices” as part of
his commitment to disengaging from Afghanistan.
“The president made clear: After 20
years at war, it’s time for American troops to come home,” Ms. Psaki said. “He
also feels and has stated that the Afghan government and the Afghan National
Defense Forces have the training, equipment and numbers to prevail, and now is
the moment for the leadership and the will in the face of the Taliban’s
aggression and violence.”
Ms. Psaki’s comments echoed a
prevailing view among the progressive national security wing of Mr. Biden’s
party that Afghan troops would fight back if given no other option.
“Like in Iraq, at a certain point
the training wheels have to come off,” said Jon Soltz, an Iraq war veteran and
the chairman of the progressive veterans group VoteVets. “That’s when the Iraqi
Army stepped up, and it will be when the Afghan Army does.”
“They may have their backs against
the wall as things move closer to Kabul, but that’s precisely when they’ll
fight the hardest and hold the line,” said Mr. Soltz, who helped to train the
Iraqi army. “We have done all we can to prepare them for this moment.”
So far, no senior Pentagon official
has expressed exasperation publicly with Mr. Biden over the Taliban surge,
which Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III predicted this past spring, when he
and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both
counseled Mr. Biden against the complete withdrawal of American troops.
“We’ve seen this movie before,” Mr.
Austin told his boss, in a reference to the Obama-era withdrawal from Iraq,
which was followed by the rise of the Islamic State. The United States ended up
returning to Iraq and launching five years of airstrikes in Iraq and Syria to
help Iraqi security forces beat back that insurgent group.
Mr. Biden has argued for pulling
out of Afghanistan for years. In 2009, while serving as vice president, he
argued for a minimal force, only to be overruled as Mr. Obama ordered a surge
of forces, then a rapid drawdown.
But a dozen years later, as
president, he made the decision to withdraw, one of the most significant
decisions of his presidency so far. And despite the likelihood that the White
House will confront terrible images of human suffering and loss in the coming
weeks and months, Mr. Biden has vowed to press ahead regardless of the
conditions on the ground.
Polls show that large numbers of
Americans in both parties support leaving Afghanistan.
Mr. Biden, declaring that the
United States had long ago accomplished its mission of denying terrorists a
haven in Afghanistan,
said in April that all American
troops would leave the country by Sept. 11. That date has since been
moved up to Aug. 31, giving the Pentagon — and Afghan forces — just over a
month to slow the Taliban surge.
Administration and military
officials have voiced conflicting views on whether the United States will
continue airstrikes after Aug. 31 to prevent Afghan cities and the Afghan
government, led by President Ashraf Ghani, from falling. But even if the
airstrikes continue, they can only do so much; the bulk of the effort will have
to come from Afghan forces on the ground.
In any event, Kunduz was never
going to be the Afghan city that might prompt Mr. Biden to rethink his
strategy, two U.S. officials said on Sunday on condition of anonymity.
His hand might be forced if Taliban
forces are on the verge of overrunning Kandahar,
Afghanistan’s second-largest city, or even Kabul, where the United
States maintains an embassy with some 4,000 people.
Helene Cooper and Katie
Rogers reported from Washington, and Thomas Gibbons-Neff from
Kabul. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
Helene Cooper is a Pentagon
correspondent. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White
House correspondent, and was part of the team awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize
for International Reporting, for its coverage of the Ebola epidemic. @helenecooper
Katie Rogers is a White House
correspondent, covering life in the Biden administration, Washington culture
and domestic policy. She joined The Times in 2014. @katierogers
Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a correspondent
in the Kabul bureau and a former Marine infantryman. @tmgneff
