There were people from 34 countries there. The Biden administration notified none of them. When Biden brought up the plan at the G7, allies strongly urged him not to do it. He then did it without notifying any of them.
This is what has America’s allies worried. Yes, pulling out of Afghanistan is a debacle, but the way it was done and the refusal to work with NATO partners or even inform them so they could start withdrawing has them livid - and thinking about new alignments. Tremendous damage has been done.
Czech President Milos Zeman labelled it “cowardice”, adding that “the Americans have lost the prestige of a global leader”.
And the speech Biden gave afterwards threw fuel on the fire:
Significant damage has been done to Europe’s (and doubtless Canada’s) expectations that the US will resume being strongly interventionist with substantial EU guidance, certainly. But those expectations might always have been increasingly unrealistic. As your cite says,
That’s “damage”, sure, in the sense that any form of breakup involves damage to the previously existing relationship. But not necessarily damage in the sense of something that needs to be fixed to get the previously existing relationship back again. That relationship, in that form, may simply be over now.
Even among liberals—and even among neoconservatives—the American public’s appetite for military intervention in the name of “upholding the global order” is severely diminished these days. That’s by no means an unmixed blessing, and naturally Europe in particular—and especially the UK—is upset at the prospect.
But I don’t think there’s much that Biden could do about it even if he wanted to. He would not reclaim any of the approval he lost over the Afghanistan-withdrawal turmoil by re-embracing the “world’s policeman” role that Americans have soured on.
Ultimately, a lot of the blame rests with the imperialist jingoistic pea-knacker neocons of twenty years ago who threw America into these catastrophic wars in the first place. I don’t excuse Biden’s mishandling of specific decisions in the short term, but a lot of the people now wagging their fingers at him are partly responsible for stupidly thrusting us into these messes over the long term.
Any damage done by the withdrawal is minuscule compared to the ongoing damage the the war itself was causing. And warmongers being sad doesn’t count as damage - warmonger tears are the sweet nectar of justice.
Oh please, any governments whining about how they weren’t notified of the withdrawal are just being stupid. We’ve known the US was going to pull out for quite some time now, ever since Trump surrendered to the Taliban. Biden made no secret of his intention to honor that agreement, even if he didn’t like some of the details of the agreement.
Any other government that wasn’t already pulling its people out are just guilty of not believing that Biden would actually go through with it. And that’s on them.
I don’t think European leaders or foreign ministries are upset over the US being less prone to foreign interventions. I don’t think there even all that upset at the US decision to leave Afghanistan. It’s the abrupt, no-consultation way it was done that everyone’s mad about. The European nations with military forces and non-governmental organisations in Afghanistan knew they were junior partners to the US in the Afghanistan coalition. But they thought they actually were partners and would be treated as such. Biden came in saying he was going to be different then Trump and would work with US allies. Turns out he’s just another liar. The abrupt withdrawal also left thousands of European nationals stuck in Afghanistan, and even more thousands of Afghani’s that had worked with European missions and that the European nations would have liked to evacuate. Lots of people are upset about that.
I don’t think there will be any near-term damage to US alliances due to the way Biden handled the Afghanistan withdrawal. For example, I don’t expect Britain’s going to change it’s mission in Iraq, even though it’s a junior partner there. But down the road, what happens if the US decides to intervene somewhere else? Iran’s been doing a lot of sabre-rattling in the Persian Gulf lately, and could increase it. What if the US wants to increase it’s naval presence there, and do so as a NATO force made up of ships from several nations? Instead of European nations agreeing because the US is a major ally, expect a lot of hard questions about whether the US is going to change it’s mind and not tell anyone, and leave it’s allies hanging
It was obvious that the Afghanistan war was being lost and that all countries would have to withdraw their military forces, their citizens, and anyone else they wanted to get out. What wasn’t obvious was that the US was going to just hand Afghanistan over to the Taliban without an effective way of managing that withdrawal. The US allies expected the US to be the leaders in organising that withdrawal, and to work with them in planning it. Instead, there was a dictatorial style decision, and all the allies were left scrambling to put their own plans in place.
No, what wasn’t obvious was that this time we hit the “and this time I mean it!” button and actually meant it. They assumed we’d delay once again as we have continuously done for years and still have a military presence there, even if they didn’t say that part out loud.
And clearly this has “irreparably” (OPs words, not mine) damaged our foreign credibility to the point we’re worse off than 2 years ago…or maybe the entire thread is based on hyperbolic exaggeration more than slightly tinged by political rancor.
Are our foreign allies happy with how this all went down? Of course not.
Has this “irreparably” harmed our relationships with them? Of course not.
No, we handed the country over to the Afghanistan’s govt, who then handed it to the Taliban. We did make the mistake of thinking that that would take some reasonable amount of time, and not immediately collapse. That’s a reasonable criticism of the our intelligence and the administration.
We did. We said when we were leaving, and we supported the infrastructure required for anyone else to leave during that time.
Dictatorial, as in our country being in charge of our military, rather than other countries being in charge of our military? Strange use of the word, but sure. We said when we were leaving, and if others objected to when we withdrew our own forces, their objections were not capitulated to.
If they wanted us to stay another month, another year, another decade, should we have honored their wishes?
Only if they hadn’t bothered to make plans in the months between the announcement of when we were leaving and when we left.
Did you see news coverage of the Kabul evacuation? I don’t think you could call that anything but abrupt. Well actually, you could call it frenzied, chaotic, ramshackle, and panicked, but you certainly couldn’t use any antonym of abrupt.
Or are you talking about the Doha agreement from February 2020? No one knew where that agreement stood prior to Biden announcing the US withdrawal. Biden himself had extended it. And peace negotiations with the Taliban were going on right up until Biden made his announcement.
That announcement of US withdrawal from Afghanistan came on 14 April 2021 with a planned completion date of 11 September 2021, and apparently with no plan in place other than a fiction of turning the military effort over to the Afghan National Army. So five months to work out and implement the withdrawal and turnover, while also containing the Taliban during that time and figuring out what would happen after the withdrawal. That’s a lot to do in a short time frame, so I’ll maintain my description of abrupt.
But whatever fiction of a military turnover there was ended on 02 July when the US pulled out of Bagram Air Base in the middle of the night on 02 July, 1 1/2 month after the withdrawal announcement, apparently without telling the Afghans they were leaving.
So effectively it was a seven week withdrawal, and then a wait in Kabul to see how long it would take the Taliban to take over.
And, as we all know, it didn’t take them very long at all. The Taliban completed their takeover and kicked the US out on 31 August, 11 days ahead of the planned (if you want to call it that) withdrawal date. Still staying with abrupt.
And if a country is a US ally, watching that debacle happen, and maybe being involved in it, don’t you think they might be reluctant to work with the US the next time it asks for help? Especially when those allies said that abrupt withdrawal was going to cause a lot of problems?
Addressing several points, you raised, but this is the easiest one to reply to. If the US had had a plan for the withdrawal at the time of Biden’s announcement, and had worked with its allies on that plan, I wouldn’t be criticising Biden. Part of that plan would have had to have been support of Afghan National Army forces, especially with air support, until the withdrawal was completed. There would have needed to be evacuation centres and schedules, not to mention the paperwork for all the Afghani’s who were being offered a chance to leave because they’d worked with foreign military, governments or NGO’s. It’s ridiculous to say that the US led an effective withdrawal because there was no leadership and the withdrawal wasn’t effective - thousands of people were left behind. The “infrastructure required for anyone else to leave” that you’re describing was Kabul airport. Good luck if you weren’t in Kabul, or were but were in hiding and unable to get past Taliban security.
And the fact is, nobody but the US could have organised a withdrawal. They were the leadership in Afghanistan. The US allies expected the US to take on that role. But instead of a organised withdrawal plan, followed by a sincere effort, there was just a hope that Afghanistan wouldn’t fall to the Taliban too quickly before a last-ditch effort could be cobbled together. How last minute? Well, you can be sure it hadn’t started at the top by 05 August. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/562135-biden-defends-afghanistan-withdrawal-says-taliban-takeover-highly
Trying to asses the Afghanistan withdrawal as anything other than an unplanned debacle is ridiculous. And the failure of leadership that caused that debacle was Joe Biden’s. Something US allies should consider in the future, before they cooperate with any other US foreign interventions.
This entire post presupposes the need for evacuation at the same time as the military withdrawal. That went against U.S. policy–we were not supposed to be “evacuating” people like it was a fucking emergency the same time we withdrew the military. Our intelligence agencies, who advise the President, were all saying the worst case scenario was that the Afghan government could fall in like 3 months, and I think most assessments were projecting it’d be around 1+ year later, and may not collapse at all. There was a State Department dissent cable that disagreed (it predicted like a 1-2 month timeframe for collapse, so even it was a rosier truth than what amounted to an 11 day collapse.)
It’s fine to say Biden should have made sure there was some “emergency contingency plan” for an instantaneous collapse of the Afghan government. But pre-staged “evacuation centers” and moving most of the civilian evacuees out well in advance wouldn’t be part of an emergency contingency plan. You, like so many, are conflating the rapidly developing emergency with what was planned and intended to happen. There was no intention of evacuating everyone with an American passport out of Afghanistan, in fact we expected to keep our Embassy manned and have various diplomatic officials there indefinitely. The Afghans eligible for SIVs, were not necessarily supposed to be sent to the United States just because the military was withdrawn, many of them were intended to remain in Afghanistan and help its civil government operate.
So Trump was bad with his treatment of US allies, and Biden promised to be better, but the standard he should to be rated on is whether he’s bad as Trump? That’s like saying one person failed a test with a 30 and a second person failed a test with a 40, and justifying the second person’s grade that at least he wasn’t the worst failure around, never mind his claims that he’d be an A student.