This month marks the 20th anniversary of the first U.S. strikes on Afghanistan. There have been so many questions about why President Biden ultimately made the calls he did to bring the forever war to an end. But a question we keep thinking about is what role did Biden have in starting the war? What we've discovered is that Biden has been making decisions about Afghanistan ever since his days as an idealistic junior senator from Delaware. I'm going to be a good little boy till I learn how the game is played down there. I've always dreamed about this.
Biden's long history in the U.S. government turns out to have played a big part in what we've seen unfold over the last couple of months in Afghanistan. Afghans are thronging to Kabul's airport, desperate to get on planes and leave the country at any cost. But anyone trying to get to the airport has to pass through Taliban checkpoints. There's been a suicide bombing at Kabul airport in Afghanistan where crowds were gathered in the hope of getting onto one of the last flights to escape Taliban rule. I was not going to extend this forever war. And I was not extending a forever exit.
I'm Alison Michaels, and over the next three episodes of the show, I'm teaming up with my Can He Do That colleague, producer Arjun Singh. We're taking an in-depth look at how President Biden's foreign policy career intertwines with the trajectory of the war in Afghanistan. We've spent months digging through the congressional record and decades of reporting. You're going to hear from people who worked alongside him over the years and others who have reported on him. And you'll hear what some of these moments in history sounded like.
And along the way, we'll unravel how it happened that a lawmaker who advocated for deeper involvement in Afghanistan became a president who felt like he had to fully pull the U.S. out of the country. So let's get into this. Arjun, you're going to pick it up from here, and I'll be back later. All right, I want to start by taking us back to the 1960s. At that time, Biden was a law student at Syracuse, and the U.S. was in the thick of a war, in Vietnam. There were hundreds of thousands of American troops that had been deployed to the country, and there was a broad debate about the draft and whether the U.S. should go in even further.
Biden was exempt from the draft because he was a student, but a lot of people his age were being sent to Vietnam. So he was paying close attention to what was happening in Washington. That included a series of Senate hearings on the war. In one, the former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union was asked what would happen if the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam altogether. His response was...
could represent in present circumstances a disservice to our own interests and even to world peace, greater than any that might have been involved by our failure to engage ourselves there in the first place. In other words, leaving Vietnam then would be worse for the world than if we never went in to begin with. That really stuck with Biden. He'd later say that exchange partially inspired him to run for office. And those words also reflected the same debates and deliberations that would plague Biden more than 50 years later.
So Biden won his first Senate election in 1972, and he was there for two years before he made his way to the Foreign Relations Committee. That committee was very focused on the Cold War. There was this fear in the U.S. that the Soviet Union was trying to muscle its way into other countries and spread communism. The foreign policy of the Soviet Union, which is supported and embraced by its satellites, is, in a word, conquest. They envision the entire world Sovietized and united communist style. The U.S. wanted to stop that spread.
Sometimes that meant the U.S. would provide economic aid to another country. But other times, they would use the CIA to support the overthrow of governments and world leaders who they felt were too favorable to the Soviet Union. That's why, in 1979, the U.S. and Joe Biden started paying attention to Afghanistan.
There was a communist government in Afghanistan backed by the Soviet Union. That government began implementing reforms that they hoped would modernize the country, but they faced very stiff resistance from people in rural areas. That resistance would evolve into this loose coalition of warlords and militias. Eventually, they banded together as the Afghan Mujahideen. The Mujahideen put up a very strong resistance to the communist government. And the Soviet Union began to worry that without any kind of support, that government was going to fall.
So in 1979, the Soviets, seeing this government struggle, invaded the country, and it caught the U.S. completely by surprise. On the eve of Christmas 1979, I was in the CIA Operations Center when the National Security Agency reported that there were over 300 flights underway bringing a Soviet Guards Airborne Division into Kabul to take over the country. Bruce Rydell was a CIA officer stationed in the Middle East at the time. The U.S. responded immediately to this invasion by the Soviet Union. Jimmy Carter, who was the president then, quickly cut a deal with the Pakistanis, the Saudis, and the British to start supplying weapons to the Afghan Mujahideen. And before the end of January 1980, the first CIA-supplied weapons began to arrive in Karachi to go on to the Mujahideen. Americans knew that Carter and congressional leaders were outraged by the Soviet Union's invasion. They didn't know that we were covertly supplying Afghan fighters with weapons. But Joe Biden sure did.
By now, Biden was on the Senate Intelligence Committee. There, he learned about that CIA plan to supply weapons to Afghan fighters, well before many of his colleagues. Here's a story I found while reporting this out. It was January 1980 during the Christmas recess, so most of Congress was out of town, and the place was practically empty. Biden and two other senators were summoned back to the Capitol, and they met in Senate Room 407, a room that some in the press had dubbed the most secure room in Congress. And in that room, they were told that the CIA was about to escalate U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. Soon, they'd provide Afghan fighters with AK-47s and other weapons to help fight the Soviets. And the senators in the room didn't object.
That wasn't Biden's only involvement in Afghanistan in those early days. As the war went on, Congress began taking a more active role. In several bills, they authorized funds for more weapons and humanitarian aid, and Biden voted in favor of many of them. I mean, if you look at a handful of bills he voted for in the 1980s, Biden approved hundreds of millions of dollars to be spent in Afghanistan, all while being aware of what was happening on the ground. The whole country was basically a battlefield. You couldn't escape the fighting. There were food shortages, energy shortages. And while America's involvement in the war contributed to these poor conditions, the efforts to keep the Soviet advances at bay did work. In 1989, the Soviet Union, feeling that the war had become too expensive and that they were incurring too many deaths, withdrew from Afghanistan in defeat. And once the Soviet troops left, American policymakers like Biden felt that there was just no need to be involved there anymore. And that turned into a real problem.
The U.S. left after providing weapons and aid there for years. A brutal civil war broke out. The same fighters who were once fighting the Soviets were now fighting each other and they were using weapons supplied by the U.S. While the U.S. and Biden turned their attention away from Afghanistan, the impact of America's actions were still playing out. And I really want to underscore just how dire the situation became in Afghanistan during that civil war.
I remember very well that there was a time you would go to your local bakery, but regardless of your family size, you wouldn't be able to get more than five pieces of bread. Up until a few months ago, Roya Rahmani was Afghanistan's ambassador to the U.S. She also grew up in Kabul in the 90s when life was really hard for ordinary Afghans. So what was the sense? At the time was a sense of nervousness, a sense of worry, a sense of how to get by every single day. I remember sometimes from like a very long distance, a relative would bring us two liters of fuel and it would be a celebration. As the Civil War went on, a new militant group emerged around 1994. This group called themselves the Taliban.
Under Taliban rule, most forms of culture were banned, including music and movies. Men were forced to grow beards, women were forced indoors, and they could only go out with the company of a man. What I saw was this, as if there was this dark shadow that had descended all over the city. There was no life, as if people were feeling like they could not breathe because of fear. The U.S. knew this. But again, what was happening in Afghanistan just wasn't a priority for them anymore.
A few years later, though, the Taliban takeover in that country would turn out to have serious repercussions for America and for Biden. So essentially, Arjun, the Taliban's in power, but the U.S. becomes less interested in Afghanistan. And instead, Biden starts to focus on the other ripple effects of the Soviet collapse. Right. Biden turns his attention away from Afghanistan. But the conflict he turns to ends up shaping his views of Afghanistan anyway. Well, I know you've got a lot more for us later on in this series. Thank you so much for taking us through all this. You got it. Up next, after the break, our colleague Karen DeYoung breaks down the conflict abroad that caught Biden's attention next.
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. One place that really captured Biden's attention after the Soviet Union collapsed was Yugoslavia in a region of Southeast Europe known as the Balkans. The country was undergoing its own breakup at the time. The lessons Biden would learn there, though, would go on to shape his perception of American power. To tell this next part of the story, I want to bring in our national security correspondent, Karen DeYoung. Hi, Karen. Hi, Alison. So remind us what was happening with the Yugoslav wars in the 90s. Serbia, which was one of the strongest of those countries and the sort of basis of its army, was trying to expand its reach and to incorporate most of the former Yugoslavia into a greater Serbia.
Thousands were fleeing. The Serbians, both with the rump Yugoslav army and their own militias that they had established, had set up allegedly death camps, rape camps. They were bombing cities. Lots of reports coming out of there of torture, of mass killings. And really, Europe didn't want anything to do with it. So what did Biden think about it at the time?
In his memoir, Biden talked about this. He said, the truth is, in 1992, it was up to the United States to lead. As long as there's one good actor in the world, every other nation can play at the margins. But when every country is acting with nothing but self-interest in mind, it's a much more dangerous world. It was up to the United States to stand up to the abuses of power where they saw them.
And so very early on, he started pushing. He had made floor speeches about the need to lift a U.S. weapons embargo that prevented the world from sending weapons to the Bosnians to defend themselves. He wanted NATO airstrikes to knock out Serb artillery and tanks that were ringing Bosnian cities. The Formulation Committee was not buying it and neither was Clinton. So it seems like Biden was kind of alone then in his desire to intervene. What did he do to really push that agenda?
In 1993, at the invitation of the Serb leader Slobodan Milošević, Biden went to visit him in Belgrade. And that became a sort of apocryphal story. Biden describes it in his memoir and in many speeches that he subsequently gave. He says he told Milošević to his face that he was a war criminal and should be put on trial. At one point, Slobodan Milošević, who was as cool as a cucumber, as we Americans would say, leaned across his small conference table and said in impeccable English, Senator, what do you think of me? And I told him I thought he was a damn war criminal.
and that he should be tried as such. And I would spend the rest of my political career trying to see that happen. Others who were there remember the exchange as somewhat less stark than that, but it seems that the word war crimes was actually used. Biden kind of made a pest of himself. He was constantly talking in the committee. He was constantly going to the floor and arguing for U.S. military intervention. I also might tell you very bluntly, I think we should also be using air power. I think we should have been using it a year ago, a year and a half ago. I think that in each time I heard the same arguments that I'm hearing here today when I hear arguments against this proposition. Too late, doesn't work, beyond our control. Wrong then, wrong 18 months ago, wrong 12 months ago, wrong eight months ago, wrong six months ago, wrong four months ago, wrong now.
In 1994, he went back to the Balkans and he found that the siege had gotten worse. He went back and addressed the Senate and said he wasn't going to apologize for being a pest. How many in this chamber, like me, have gone to Holocaust memorial events and heard the refrain, never again, never again? On the same continent, in the same proximity, to the same death camps, it is happening again and happened again. Within weeks of that, Congress voted unilaterally to lift the arms embargo on Bosnia, and Clinton began a pretty ferocious air campaign.
Within two years, though, attention had turned to Kosovo, where insurgency from ethnic Albanians against the Serbs was taking place. Biden, he says, again pressed Clinton to start airstrikes. We should go on the ground. We should announce there's going to be American casualties. We should go to Belgrade and we should have a Japanese-German-style occupation of that country. And we should have public trials. And eventually NATO began bombing Serb targets in the spring of 1999. And U.S. ground troops were sent in. And NATO-supervised government was set up in an effort to make Kosovo independent.
So essentially, in the case of Kosovo, the U.S. intervened, they went in on the ground, and then they led the effort to build a new government. And in Biden's view, all of that was a success. So what did he take forward from that experience? I think he learned two things that maybe are even contradictory. That there's a worldwide struggle between the liberal values of democracy and what he considered to be destructive ideologies in which America has a responsibility to expand the conditions for democracy to flourish and commit itself to a better life or risk greater instability at home.
Put simply, it's in the vital interest of the United States that stability be preserved in Europe in order for us to be able to play the constructive role in Latin America and in the Pacific Rim and the rest of the world. And I think obviously in the Balkans was something that we saw in other conflicts that came later. You had a part of the world where there were different religions. You had different ethnic groups. You had different ways of looking at what Yugoslavia had been and small countries that had been brought together basically against their will to form a larger country. And all of that was falling apart. And I think that's one thing that Biden saw and that stuck with him, that you couldn't combine all these people that didn't want to be one country, that didn't see how they had a lot in common with other people. It just wasn't going to work and that we shouldn't try to make it work. In Biden's view, after the wars in the Balkans, there would be a new world order, one where America would be out front and in charge.
I don't believe our national interests can be furthered, let alone achieved, in splendid indifference to the rest of the world's views of our policies. He delivered these remarks in a speech at the National Press Club with an American flag draped behind him. Our interests are furthered when we meet our international obligations and when we keep our treaties. They're furthered when we maintain an unequal military able to deter any threat at any place, at any time and anywhere. Biden's deeply held view that the U.S. should be the world's moral authority would be put to the test. His faith in American power would be challenged just hours after he issued a warning in that same speech. While the real threat comes to this country in the hold of a ship, the belly of a plane, or smuggled into a city in the middle of the night in a vial in a backpack. He delivered that speech on September 10th, 2001. Next time on our series. Oh my goodness, we're looking at a live picture from Washington and there is smoke pouring out of the Pentagon. Now let there be no doubt.
The United States and the civilized nations of the world will unite and win this struggle. And tonight, the United States of America makes the following demands on the Taliban. Deliver to United States authorities all the leaders of al-Qaeda who hide in your land. This episode of Can He Do That? was produced by Arjun Singh with help from Corey Suzuki. Editing is by Robin Amer, Sharla Friedland, Alison Michaels, Karen DeYoung, and Renita Jablonski. Sound mixing and design by Merit Jacob. Logo art by Greg Manifold. Special thanks to Peter Finn, Greg Jaffe, Dan Balls, and Cleve Woodson.
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