Uncle Bob can fix just about anything around the house, at least according to him. But when it comes to natural gas appliances, they should always be inspected by a qualified professional. Learn more at enbridgegas.com slash safety. Hi, Allison again. Thanks for spending your week listening or re-listening to our series from October about President Biden and the war in Afghanistan. We're about to bring you part three. But before I go, I want to mention one thing as the new year approaches. There aren't many things that you can spend $9.99 on that will make a difference to you every day and leave you smarter and more informed about the stories that matter to you. A pair of socks or a candle isn't going to do that. But for the cost of those things, you can give yourself or someone you care about a full year subscription to The Washington Post. $9.99. That amazing deal is back and ends on January 4th. It only takes a minute to subscribe. So hit pause and do it now. Go to WashingtonPost.com slash subscribe.
Okay, that's it. Now here's part three of our series. In 2010, the U.S. had been at war in Afghanistan for nearly a decade, and things weren't going well. The U.S. was still fighting back the Taliban, a group that they thought they had already vanquished. Vice President Biden had become what the New York Times described as President Obama's in-house pessimist on the war. We are making progress. Are we making sufficient progress fast enough? The answer remains to be seen.
He felt strongly that the war needed to end. And in December 2010, in an interview with NBC's David Gregory, Biden doubled down on an Obama administration promise that U.S. troops would start to leave the next year. We're starting it in July of 2011, and we're going to be totally out of there come hell or high water by 2014. The U.S. wouldn't come through on that promise to fully end the war then. The withdrawal wouldn't happen until Biden finally took the reins as commander-in-chief.
I'm Alison Michaels, and this is the final episode in a special series about President Biden and the war in Afghanistan. In this installment, I'm back with my colleague Arjun Singh. In the first two episodes, we saw how Biden went from being an advocate of nation building in Afghanistan to one of the strongest voices in the Obama administration privately arguing against it. If you haven't listened to parts one and two, you might want to go back and do that now. In our final episode, we look at how Biden's time as vice president shaped his unflinching commitment to withdraw troops quickly, even in the face of Taliban advances. So Arjun, let's pick up this story after Biden leaves the vice presidency in 2017. Sure.
of the world. Thank you. Trump's win was really shocking for Biden. Biden had run for president twice before, but now he was alarmed about the divisions he saw in the country and believed that after decades in Washington, he was in a unique position to bring unity. So barely halfway through Trump's term, for the third time in his life, Biden officially launched his bid for president. If we step up, we lead by the power of our example, not by the example of our power. The only thing that can tear America apart is America itself, and we cannot let that happen.
And notably, even though the U.S. had now been at war for nearly 18 years, Afghanistan wasn't a major campaign issue. And Biden didn't bring it up in his announcement. Soon, though, the topic became unavoidable. In December 2019, The Washington Post published a major expose, more than 2,000 pages of documents known as the Afghanistan Papers. A bombshell series of investigative reports in The Washington Post exposing heartbreaking truths about the U.S. war in Afghanistan, which has claimed some 2,400 U.S. lives and cost nearly a trillion dollars.
The investigation revealed that for years, U.S. officials misled the public about the war in Afghanistan. Across multiple administrations, officials buried what they had come to believe was the truth. This war was unwinnable. Shortly after that reporting came out, the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, including Joe Biden, gathered in Los Angeles for a debate. As a foreign policy nerd, I remember watching this moment, and it was a big one for Biden on Afghanistan.
He had been publicly supportive of Obama's troop search, even though privately he disagreed with the plan. So I didn't know what to expect when the moderator asked. As vice president, what did you know about the state of the war? And do you believe that you were honest with the American people about it? The reason I can speak to this, it's well known if any of you followed it, my view on Afghanistan. I was sent by the president before we got sworn into Afghanistan. He sort of meanders through the response and points out that he had called for a narrower mission.
But then the moderator pressed Biden, pointing to the Afghanistan papers reporting, and Biden finally says, I'm the guy from the beginning who argued that it was a big, big mistake to surge forces to Afghanistan, period. We should not have done it. And I argued against it constantly. He breaks with Obama and finally says publicly how he really felt about the war. Biden would, of course, go on to win the presidency. The people of this nation have spoken. They've delivered us a clear victory, a convincing victory, a victory.
And despite a global pandemic, racial unrest, and an economy teetering on the brink, Biden made Afghanistan a priority. As early as February, just weeks after being inaugurated, Biden was figuring out how to end the war. But Biden was not just inheriting the war. He was also inheriting a withdrawal deadline that had been negotiated by the Trump administration. The Trump administration decided to negotiate directly with the Taliban. They had little faith in the Afghan government and thought that a diplomatic settlement with the Taliban was the best way out. After 18 months of talks, they struck a deal. Two days ago, the United States signed a deal with the Taliban so that after 19 years of conflict and very close to 20, we can finally begin to bring our amazing troops back home.
U.S. and NATO troops would leave Afghanistan by May of 2021. In return, the Taliban agreed to enter peace talks with the Afghan government and keep terrorists out of the country. They also promised they wouldn't attack the U.S. military. The presidents have tried. They have been unable to get any kind of an agreement. The relationship is very good that I have with the Mueller.
Critics thought that the deal was unrealistic. It seemed unlikely that the Taliban, a group that fought against the U.S. for 20 years, would be good faith partners. Some lawmakers, like Representative Carolyn Maloney from New York, were vocal about their opposition to the deal. I am concerned about the withdrawal of U.S. forces. Will it leave a power vacuum that al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups can exploit again to plot attacks against Americans and our allies?
And even Trump's own former national security advisor, H.R. McMaster, thought it was a bad idea. I think that it's an unwise policy, and I think what we require in Afghanistan is a sustained commitment to help the Afghan government and help the Afghan security forces continue to bear the brunt of this fight. And Biden could have walked away from this Trump deal, but instead he chose to see it through. On April 14th, just shy of three months into his presidency, Biden spoke to the nation from the treaty room in the White House, the same room where President George W. Bush had announced the first airstrikes in Afghanistan.
There, Biden promised, quote, the buck stops with me. I'm now the fourth United States president to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan. Two Republicans, two Democrats. I will not pass this responsibility onto a fifth. He made another promise that day. We'll not conduct a hasty rush to the exit. We'll do it responsibly, deliberately, and safely. Biden said the withdrawal would begin on May 1st. But things in Afghanistan weren't going well. It was clear that the Afghan army would struggle to sustain itself without U.S. support.
They needed air power, and their own U.S.-supplied air force could not be sustained without expensive contractors. Ground troops were poorly led, and many hadn't been paid for months. And the generals warned that a hasty withdrawal could lead to chaos. Around this time, General Kenneth McKenzie, who is the head of Central Command and in charge of all U.S. forces in the Middle East, testified in front of Congress. I am concerned about the ability of the Afghan military to hold on after we leave, the ability of the Afghan Air Force to fly in particular after we remove the support for those aircraft. McKenzie wasn't alone. There were other high-level military advisors within the Biden administration who shared his concerns. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley would later say that they warned Biden, without at least 2,500 troops on the ground, the Afghan government could quickly collapse.
But the thing is, Biden was skeptical of the Pentagon's positions. During the Obama years, he advised President Obama to not let the military really drive a decision on something like Afghanistan in terms of adding troops, tens of thousands of troops. That's Washington Post journalist Robert Costa. He and colleague Bob Woodward wrote about Biden's decision-making around the withdrawal in their book Peril. When Biden was vice president, he believed Obama had been boxed in by his military advisors and pressured to commit more troops. According to the book, Biden even told advisors in 2009, quote, the military doesn't f*** around with me. That's a real sign that Biden believes the president, once he assumes the presidency, he's the decision maker. And he also believes the war has been going on too long and it's holding up the Ghani government in a way that's unsustainable. So he comes into this decision making process with a lot of experience and a lot of hardened views on what's possible or not possible in Afghanistan.
So, despite the warnings from the Pentagon, Biden moved forward with a May 1st exit deadline. And as soon as U.S. troops started moving out, the Taliban started moving in. Taliban forces are seizing control of the country's cities at an alarming rate. The threat is so serious that the U.S. embassy is warning Americans to get out of the country now. In some places, the fighting between the Taliban and local Afghan government forces was rough. But in others, fighters were just surrendering, even handing over their weapons. As the summer went on and the Taliban took on more territory, the outlook grew more pessimistic.
But publicly, Biden denied what he privately knew from intelligence reports. The Afghan government was on the verge of collapse. Mr. President, thank you very much. Here's Biden at a news conference in July. Your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse. That is not true. Can you please clarify what they have told you about whether that will happen or not? That is not true. They did not reach that conclusion. Biden would repeat this over and over in public. The question now is where do they go from here?
that the jury is still out. But the likelihood there's going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely. He was saying that he had faith in the Afghan government. And now we know that, in fact, he did not. Even as he was saying that, he had intelligence that it might fail. Amy Linsky is a White House reporter here at The Post. Biden, when asked about this, has said that he felt that he had to show confidence in this government and that if he failed to show confidence in the government, it could have fallen faster. And that may be true, but the cost of that decision is fairly high when you have Americans who are still there.
More after the break. When it comes to the big questions, who you ask matters. From breaking news to politics that impact your life to advice you can trust. Get answers you don't have to question with Ask the Post AI. Trained exclusively on post journalism with clear sourcing. And if we don't know the answer, we'll tell you. Ask the Post AI. Find it on WashingtonPost.com or in the app. By early August, the Taliban had gained significant ground in Afghanistan. The country was in a precarious situation, and that was clear to the White House.
By now, the White House knew that the Afghan government was likely to fall to the Taliban, but intelligence reports were saying that it wouldn't happen until later in the year. Then, on August 14th, one of Afghanistan's largest cities, Mazar-e-Sharif, fell to the Taliban. The Taliban now control the entire north of Afghanistan as well as large swaths of the south and the west. The takeover prompted Defense Secretary Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to call for a relocation of all U.S. embassy personnel to the international airport in Kabul.
As it stands this hour, Taliban fighters surround the capital, Kabul, and negotiations are underway to secure a transfer of power. That day, just hours after telling the administration he would stay and fight to the death, Ghani fled the country in secret along with much of the military command structure, and Afghans prepared for the worst. With no one left to defend Kabul, the Taliban entered the capital without firing a shot. You can see here, if you look at this video, a number of armed men celebrating and even sitting in the chair that Afghan President Ghani relinquished just hours ago. And images of that reality sent a clear message that Afghanistan was lost. It kicked off a crisis as Afghan people, Americans, and other allies began fleeing to the Kabul airport in hopes that the U.S. could evacuate them.
Many of the people trying to flee were Afghans who had worked with the U.S. government over the years, fighting against the Taliban. The desperate scenes were getting wall-to-wall news coverage, and the world watched in horror. The Biden administration was facing a lot of global criticism. Why were they seemingly so unprepared for how this was unfolding? And why were they refusing to change course? Biden responded by sending 5,000 troops to secure the airport and help with evacuations. And those evacuations picked up speed. In a span of just 10 days, the U.S. was able to get more than 70,000 people out of the country. The Pentagon and the White House started to feel more confident. Things seemed to be back on track. But then, on August 26th, there was an explosion outside of Kabul's international airport. An attack by a terrorist group in Afghanistan known as ISIS-K.
13 U.S. service members and dozens of Afghans were killed. It was the deadliest day for American troops in Afghanistan in a decade. They were part of the bravest, most capable, most selfless military on the face of the earth. And they're part of simply what I call the backbone of America. They're the spine of America. The best the country has to offer. Despite this, Biden continued to defend the withdrawal. On August 31st, when the U.S. officially left, he addressed the nation. Last night in Kabul, the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan.
The longest war in American history. At this point, some American citizens and some Afghans who wanted to leave remained in Kabul. Still, Biden held up the evacuation effort as a success. We completed one of the biggest airlifts in history with more than 120,000 people evacuated to safety. That number is more than double what most experts thought were possible. No nation, no nation has ever done anything like it in all of history. And he defended his decision to commit to a unilateral withdrawal, framing it as a stark choice between war and peace. So we're left with a simple decision.
Either follow through on the commitment made by the last administration and leave Afghanistan, or say we weren't leaving and commit another tens of thousands more troops going back to war. That was the choice, the real choice, between leaving or escalating. He distanced himself from ideas that he had advocated for years earlier. The man who once said, In some parts of the administration, nation building is still a dirty phrase, but the alternative to nation building is chaos. Now said, Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building.
It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy. And in a departure from his long-ago stance on military intervention, Biden drew broader conclusions about America's role in the world. So Ardun, after all of your reporting on this, what are your biggest takeaways? First of all, one thing that sometimes gets lost is that the story of Afghanistan doesn't start or end with the U.S., but what happens next, that's going to be the consequence of American policy. And also after listening to Biden's public comments, it's interesting that you don't hear him take a lot of responsibility for the things that the U.S. got wrong. You really only hear him talk about nation building and how he's turned his back on that. So one question that emerges for me from all this reporting is, have things actually changed? Or will Biden end up making the same kinds of decisions that led us in Afghanistan in the first place?
Arjun, thank you so much for all your reporting on this. Thank you. It's been almost two months since the U.S. ended its mission in Afghanistan. The Taliban is back in power and the future of the country is uncertain. So then after all of this, how does President Biden see America's role in the world now? How does he think America should use its power? I went back to our colleague from the first part of this series, national security reporter Karen DeYoung, to get insight on whether Biden's changed.
I think the first thing you have to say about Biden, and he has said innumerable times, that you have to be strong at home or you can't project power and credibility abroad. That power has to be used in furtherance of American values and interests, whether that's military, economic or political power. And beyond that, it should be used whenever possible in conjunction with allies and partners. I think Biden believes that we should no longer be inserting large quantities of troops in hot wars on other continents unless these primary American interests are involved. So he doesn't believe that we should be sending troops into conflicts abroad without American interests. He also seems like he's come to the conclusion that nation building isn't really a tool that he thinks we should use in America's toolkit. So how does this change the way we actually operate? What do we do instead? I don't think any American president gets into a war with the objective of nation building. The larger question of development and nation building has always been couched as advantageous to American interests. But in places like Afghanistan and Vietnam...
it became a slippery slope involving us in places where we had little idea of local history, of interests, or of culture. We wanted to make them like us, thinking that was the best way to protect ourselves, but that didn't work. So what should we do instead? Biden believes we should ramp up our intelligence and counterterrorism capabilities, use military force when necessary with the smallest possible commitment on the ground, build our deterrence capabilities against powers such as China and threats such as North Korea, and again, lead allies in smart policies that will avoid major wars in the first place. Considering all of this together, What do you expect Biden's legacy will be on Afghanistan? What will history remember? I think that's still undecided. I don't think we know yet. If the Taliban see it in their interest to modify how they carry out their ideology, if they adopt a modicum of inclusiveness, keep a lid on global terrorism emanating from inside the country, then I think Biden will be remembered as the one who got America out of an untenable situation with smart policies. But if none of those things happen, then I think it's a different story.
This episode of Can He Do That was produced by Arjun Singh with help from Corey Suzuki. Editing is by Robin Amer, Sharla Freeland, Allison Michaels, Karen DeYoung, and Renita Jablonski. Sound mixing and design by Merit Jacob. Logo art by Greg Manifold. Special thanks to Peter Finn and Shane Harris.
When it comes to the big questions, who you ask matters. From breaking news to politics that impact your life, to advice you can trust. Get answers you don't have to question with Ask the Post AI. Trained exclusively on post journalism with clear sourcing. And if we don't know the answer, we'll tell you. Ask the Post AI. Find it on WashingtonPost.com or in the app.