Biden: "The US could not and should not continue to fight in a war that Afghans are not willing to fight"

President Joe Biden greets his arrival in Washington from the Camp David residence on Monday.Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP

US President Joe Biden on Monday firmly defended his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and blamed Afghan leaders for the collapse of the country - "much faster than expected," he admitted - for their lack of political will to join forces against the Taliban. Not a trace of self-criticism in a speech expected by the dizzying pace of events in Kabul; only the justification of the withdrawal with already known arguments. "American soldiers could not and should not continue fighting and dying in a war that the Afghans are not willing to fight," he said, after referring to "the surrender" and the march of the Afghan authorities, led by President Ashraf Ghani. , after the entry of the Mujahideen into Kabul this Sunday.

As his government representatives reiterated over the weekend, the objectives of the US presence in Afghanistan have been met: to stop Al Qaeda and capture Osama Bin Laden. "But the terrorist threat has far exceeded Afghanistan and reached other countries," among which he cited Somalia (Al Shabab) or Iraq and Syria under ISIS. “The goal of the deployment was never to build a democratic nation; just fight terrorism ”, an argument, recalled Biden, who has defended since his time as vice president of Barack Obama.

The president assured that there were only two options before him: follow the agreement signed by Trump with the Taliban in February 2020 "or escalate the conflict" of war.

But "if the Afghan forces were not going to fight, staying a year or more was not going to mean anything," he stressed, accusing the Afghan leaders of lack of will despite having given them "everything they needed."

The president was silent throughout the weekend, in a silence underscored by the accelerated pace of events, until the images of chaos and violence of a desperate mob at the Kabul airport advised him to interrupt his vacation to go to the nation, early in the afternoon of this Monday, with statements that only hours before had no calendar.

In his penultimate attempt to justify the decision to leave Afghanistan, Biden had again insisted in the morning, through his National Security adviser, Jake Sullivan, that the fall of Kabul was not inevitable and that responsibility for the collapse should be attributed to the Afghan forces.

This argument, together with the promise to "lead the international community in the defense of human rights in Afghanistan" - a toast to the sun also announced by Sullivan - is the firewall that the Biden Administration has interposed in the face of the avalanche of criticism. by the hasty evacuation of the Central Asian country.

More information

• Ashraf Ghani, the president who failed in his attempt to make peace with the Taliban

• Taliban panic sparks chaos at Kabul airport

Join EL PAÍS now to follow all the news and read without limits

Subscribe here

Biden spent the weekend at the Camp David residence, from where he flew to the White House at noon today even though he originally planned to stay until Wednesday.

His was a weekend without public appearances -except for a photo that shows him alone, following the collapse of Kabul on several screens- and with an advertisement of domestic dyes, his strength: the 25% increase in the amount of the program of the federal government against hunger, the food stamp system.

Domestic agenda

Biden has never hidden his intention to loosen the moorings of distant conflicts to focus on the recovery and economic reconstruction of the country after the pandemic, but the achievements of the start of his mandate (the rescue for the victims of the coronavirus, the infrastructure plan and the package additional welfare aid, pending) may be clouded by the Afghanistan fiasco, while Washington clarifies responsibility for miscalculations on the ground.

After just seven months in the White House, the withdrawal from Afghanistan will loom large over the rest of his term. Few of the Democrats and Republicans, or the bulk of public opinion, disputed the relevance of the exit, but the timing and manner did. And what has been seen in Afghanistan these days confirms, according to most analysts, the disconnect between reality on the ground and intelligence and defense analysis, reducing to the category of anecdote that "mission accomplished" of George W. Bush, proclaimed in May of 2003, just days after the US invasion of Iraq, before the country was engulfed by sectarian violence and the barbarism of ISIS. Compared to the triumphalism of Bush - the same one that embarked the US in the post-9/11 Afghan "war on terror" -,Biden's confidence in a harmless exit from Afghanistan sounds to many naive or myopia.

Overestimates and errors

For some analysts, Biden's belief that Afghanistan was not going to fall into the hands of the Taliban is an example of

wishful thinking.

, based on an accumulation of overestimations (the real capacity of the Afghan forces, for example) and errors such as ignoring the precedent of Iraq, or the own feudal structure of Afghanistan. Senior Pentagon officials, led by his Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, and General Mark Milley, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tried to convince him at the end of March to leave a checkpoint of a few thousand troops. -from 3,000 to 4,500, almost double the number of troops deployed at the time- to avoid a repetition of Iraq's war drift, when in 2014 the regular army was defeated by ISIS after the departure of US combat troops, which that forced the then president, Barack Obama, to send more troops to the Arab country.

Biden's insistence on the need to leave Afghanistan, convinced that the US presence would only increase dependence on Kabul, was already final in April, when he announced the withdrawal, in principle for September 11. At the end of June, intelligence agencies maintained that the threat to Kabul would take a year and a half to materialize if the Taliban continued to gain ground, as they had been doing following the withdrawal agreement signed by Trump with the Mujahideen in February 2020.

Reality has shown this weekend that it took the Taliban ten days to take a military tour of Afghanistan, Kabul included.

The attribution of responsibilities reaches the entire apparatus of the Biden Administration, but also the three previous ones, due to the succession of errors committed over 20 years, which has lasted the US deployment.

Illiterate troop

According to an analysis by the agency France Presse, the first of them was a high-generation military equipment, designed as a modern Army, but inadequate in a country where only 30% of the population has access to solvent and good electricity supply. part of the troops, illiterate, lacked the training to use it. According to the latest report from SIGAR (the Office of the Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction), presented last week to Congress, "advanced weapons, vehicle and logistics systems used by the Western military were far from capabilities. of the Afghan force, largely illiterate and uneducated ”.

Another miscalculation was the confidence in the numerical superiority of the Afghan forces - a total of 300,000 troops, between the military and the police - compared to the 70,000-75,000 Taliban, as stressed by Biden last month. In fact, in July 2020, according to the Counter-Terrorism Center of the West Point Military Academy, of the 300,000 only 185,000 were members of the army or special operations forces of the Ministry of Defense, while the police and other bodies security made up the rest. West Point's assessment put the percentage of trained fighters at 60%, according to Afp. Without counting the 8,000 members of the Air Force, the most correct estimate of the composition of the Afghan Army would be 96,000.

Added to the lack of training of the troops is demoralization, at a rate of up to 25% desertions per year until 2020, according to the SIGAR report. Among the reasons for the abandonment is the non-payment of wages - the sole responsibility of the Kabul government after the US announced its withdrawal in April - and the lack of supplies, as well as food or supplies. Maintaining high troop morale did not help, either, the report emphasizes, the Pentagon's promise to continue helping Afghan troops remotely, once the withdrawal is complete, through the Zoom platform, given the precarious technology in the country. The withdrawal of the contractors on whom the maintenance of logistics in Afghanistan depended was the nail that riveted the coffin.

Subscribe here to the

EL PAÍS América

newsletter

and receive all the informative keys of the current situation in the region.