Welcome, fellas. I don't know why you're here, but it's nice to see you all here. Thank you for being here. On September 10th, 2001, Senator Joe Biden spoke to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
My dad has an expression. It's better to be lucky than good. By this point, Biden was a Senate veteran and chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. It had been just a couple of years since Biden had encouraged the U.S. to carry out military missions in the former Yugoslavia. In this speech, he argued that the country should continue to use American power around the world to spread what he called American values. Now, the spotlight remains on us and is brighter than ever. We're at a pivotal moment when American values and principles have taken center stage like no other time in our history than the global theater.
How we perform on that stage is as much about our honor, our decency, our pride, as it is about our strategic policy. He also warned that we needed to shift the way we think about the country's national security. He said the next threat to America wouldn't come in the form of traditional warfare. 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. And it turned out Biden was right.
This just in, you were looking at obviously a very disturbing live shot there. That is the World Trade Center, and we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers. Oh my gosh, another plane has just hit another building. We're looking at a live picture from Washington, and there is smoke pouring out of the Pentagon. Biden was at the Capitol when it was evacuated. Later that day, the building was shut down, but he and his colleagues went back and stood outside on the steps. God bless America, my home sweet.
This is the second episode in a special series from Can He Do That about President Biden and the war in Afghanistan. I'm Alison Michaels, and I'm back with my colleague Arjun Singh. Hey there. And we should say, if you haven't heard part one, you might want to go back and listen to that first. In this episode, as 9-11 spurs the war in Afghanistan, Joe Biden becomes an outspoken advocate for not just military intervention, but for nation building. History is going to judge us very harshly, I believe, if we allow the hope of a liberated Afghanistan to evaporate because we are fearful of the phrase nation building or we do not stay the course.
As the war drags on, though, Biden begins to doubt that strategy and comes to question whether the U.S. should be in Afghanistan at all. Okay, so let's go back to the night of September 11th. The CIA director told President George W. Bush that Osama bin Laden and his terrorist group, al-Qaeda, were behind the attacks. Right. And the next day, after an intelligence briefing, Biden went to the floor of the Senate, and he had a message for the attackers. We are counting and we are looking. Words will not be sufficient. Actions will be demanded. His warning? Those who did this had to pay.
Arjun, you've spent so much time looking back at records from this era and listening to archival tape. What Biden said there, how did that fit in with the sinking in Washington at the time? And really, where did things go from there? So the general attitude in most of Washington was that there had to be some kind of action. There had to be retribution. And it turned out that the perpetrators of the attack, al-Qaeda and their leader Osama bin Laden, were in Afghanistan, given safe harbor by the Taliban. So just three days after we were attacked, the Senate, Joe Biden included, voted 98 to 0 to give the president permission to attack al-Qaeda. And that was called the Authorization for the Use of Military Force.
The broad language of that resolution granted a lot of power to the president. It would let President Bush and future presidents use force against terrorists wherever they saw fit, without additional congressional approval. And 20 years later, that authority is still there. So with that power in hand, President Bush went to Congress, and he issued an ultimatum to the Taliban. Deliver to United States authorities all the leaders of al-Qaeda who hide in your land. Needless to say, Afghanistan did not deliver any leaders of al-Qaeda to the American government. On October 7, 2001, Bush ordered the first airstrikes on the country.
This was the start of the war. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Did Biden support that step by Bush to strike Afghanistan? Was he in favor of it? He did. But what's interesting is that it wasn't quite for the same reasons as Bush. How do you make war against a terrorist organization that has no real infrastructure and a government that you do not recognize, that only three countries in the world recognized at the time? Jonah Blank worked for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he says that for Biden, the answer was there had to be some kind of military action. So that's how Joe Biden got to the place of...
We're going to have to use military force because there really aren't any other tools that can get the job done. The job being preventing another terrorist attack on American soil or on American interests, on American allies, partners, and punish those who have committed this attack. So if you're going to do that, then you're going to have to have military action in Afghanistan. So basically, Biden's primary goal in supporting a strike in Afghanistan was really just to prevent another terrorist attack? It was. But he also thought that part of preventing another terrorist attack meant bringing stability to Afghanistan so that it wouldn't be a hub for terrorist networks.
Biden didn't think that just going in with a military campaign alone would be enough for that. He thought that the country needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. In fact, if you go back just a few days before the first airstrikes began, Biden went to the Senate floor and he called for a billion-dollar spending plan to rebuild Afghanistan's infrastructure. We can establish our credibility by committing ourselves to provide this aid now, before the first bomb falls. And the fund I propose would address not only the short-term goals, but the more important and more difficult longer-term ones as well.
That's notable because Biden was kind of alone in calling for this level of investment. This was way more money than anyone else in Congress wanted to spend and certainly more than the Bush administration wanted to. And it shows that in those early days, Biden was calling for a really big commitment to nation building. Whatever we do in Afghanistan, whether it involves a commitment of military, political, or humanitarian assets, must be geared toward a long-term solution. We cannot repeat the mistakes of the past. If we think only in the short term, only of getting bin Laden and the Taliban, which we must do.
We just are begging for greater trouble down the line. Now, according to Jonah, Biden also believed that an effort to rebuild Afghanistan would show goodwill towards the Afghan people. And he hoped that goodwill would make a future Afghan government less likely to harbor groups like al-Qaeda. So by the end of the year, with a combination of airstrikes, CIA operatives, and special operations forces on the ground, the U.S. had eliminated or driven out al-Qaeda and mostly beaten back the Taliban. And with them out of the picture, now it was time to start thinking about what a new Afghan government would look like.
So with a group of stakeholders in Afghanistan, the occupying powers established a new central government. So then what role did the U.S. play in taking steps toward that new government? The U.S. did quite a bit. They helped write a new constitution, they set up a judiciary, they created rules to hold free and fair elections, and they also wrote into the constitution equal rights for women and minorities. And interestingly, the plan was adopted from some of what the U.S. and Joe Biden had learned about nation building in the Balkans in the 90s. Initially, the Bush White House and the Pentagon just wanted to help the Afghan army stabilize the country. Biden and many others wanted Bush to go further.
Eventually, they convinced him to keep the U.S. in the country for the long run. And at first, the U.S. presence was really welcomed among a lot of the Afghan people. relieved that the Taliban were gone and they were pretty optimistic and hopeful that things were about to change in a major way. That's Griff Whitty. He's a national correspondent for The Post these days, but I wanted to talk to him because in the early 2000s, he was one of the Post reporters in Afghanistan. Let's not forget that Afghanistan had been at war at this point almost continuously for two decades. And I certainly encountered when I talked with people in Kabul and beyond Kabul when I visited in 2002 for the first time, so many people.
who spoke about the war in Afghanistan in the past tense. They would say, we have been at war for two decades. Thankfully, that is over now. We can begin a new chapter in this country's history, one that is marked by peace and good relations with our neighbors. We are done with fighting. We are done with war. Biden actually went to Afghanistan himself around this time. What was that trip like for him? It was a pretty important moment. He was one of the first members of Congress to visit Afghanistan after 9-11, and what he saw there would shape his view of the war.
When they arrived in Afghanistan in January of 2002, Biden and his team had to fly into Bagram Air Base because the international airport in Kabul had been closed for years. And to get to the U.S. Embassy from there, they had to drive over a road that still had active minds on it. And in a testament to how long it had been since the U.S. Embassy had last been used, there was still a framed picture of Ronald Reagan hanging on the wall.
Biden wasn't staying in any kind of fancy hotel or nice accommodations. Kabul was still recovering from decades of war. So he and his team bunked with Marines, they ate meals together, and he spent a lot of time listening to their impressions on the ground. And according to Jonah, who again was a close advisor and was on this trip with him, Biden felt like he learned a lot more about the war from those conversations than he had from the Bush administration. And there's another moment from that trip that really stuck out to Biden. He told this story in an interview with The New Yorker in 2004.
Biden said he was touring a girl's school in Kabul, where the impact from decades of war was really showing. It was bitterly cold, there was plastic on the windows, and there was only one lightbulb hanging from the ceiling to illuminate the room. As he was preparing to leave, a young Afghan girl stopped him and said, America must stay. Biden's response was, I promise I'll come back. He said that this was a, quote, catalytic event for him, one that really reinforced his belief that America had to stay, and stay to improve the life of ordinary Afghans.
We are welcome here. We're the first liberating army in the history of that country to come in. And that's how they view us. That surprised the devil out of me. So Biden brings that belief back to Washington and he pushes for even more money to go to Afghanistan. And so over the next few years, the U.S. puts nearly 20,000 American troops on the ground and spends billions of dollars on reconstruction aid. So looking back at this period in the early 2000s, it really seems like Afghanistan was moving toward this vision of democracy that Biden had hoped for.
It was definitely moving in that direction. In 2004, the country had presidential elections, though there were a lot of allegations of fraud and there was also violence as people went to the polls. But it did seem like the Taliban were receding into the background. And by 2004, Biden really felt like things were on the right track. But that optimism wouldn't last. More after the break.
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In 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq and the Bush administration redirected its resources and attention away from Afghanistan. Bush wanted to hand over a majority of the Afghan effort to NATO and other international allies. But on the ground, it was becoming clear that the Taliban was preparing to come back. All of a sudden, you start to see the Taliban reemerge. You start to see suicide bombings, which were something that were alien to Afghanistan. That's post-reporter Griff Whitty again. And the United States officials who I spoke with were really reluctant to acknowledge that security was deteriorating. And they would insist, actually, everything is fine. Actually, the country is safe. Security is quite good. This is nothing to be concerned about. You're just talking about a few dead enders in the Taliban here. They're not a real force to be reckoned with. But those assessments were completely wrong. The Taliban was taking back a lot of territory. And meanwhile, the U.S.-backed central government was failing its people.
Sometimes in rural areas, the United States actually worked with militias or warlords who had been terrorizing rural Afghans. And over the next several years, the U.S. would take a larger role in training the Afghan army. But that army became riddled with corruption. Soldiers weren't always getting paid, there was drug use in the ranks, and there was just a real culture clash between the American soldiers and the Afghan ones they were training. Not to mention the billions of dollars that Biden and others had pushed for wasn't always going towards reconstruction projects like improving schools or bettering the life of Afghans. Instead, corrupt officials working for the U.S.-backed government were pocketing the money and using it for their own personal benefit.
All of that meant that sometimes civilians actually preferred living in Taliban-controlled territory. It's important to remember that the Taliban are not only a military force, that when they would go in and take territory, they would do so, of course, with arms. They would do so at the point of a rifle. But at the same time, once they had taken the territory, they would set up a shadow government in that place. And the shadow government would attempt to do all the things that any other government would do. They would provide people with food and assistance and they would meet out justice. They had courts and they had prosecutors and they had trials.
they were attempting to demonstrate to people, hey, we can do this and we can do it better than the Afghan government that's backed by the United States can do. And in a lot of these rural areas in the countryside, the Taliban were doing it better than the Afghan government was. They were doing it in a way that perhaps was less corrupt, although certainly there's plenty of corruption in the Taliban. But in certain places, they were doing it in a way that was less corrupt. And they were doing it in a way that was perhaps more in accordance with the values of people in very rural, very traditional areas who were really uncomfortable with the idea of Americans, foreigners, non-Muslims coming in and telling them, this is how you should run your country.
Seeing all of that, Biden started to become disillusioned and skeptical that an Afghan government would ever be able to work without international support. And to Biden, that was embodied by the head of the Afghan government, Hamid Karzai. Karzai is a member of a prominent Afghan political family, and he had been handpicked by the US government to lead Afghanistan in the post-Taliban era. But as the war dragged on, the US and Karzai started to grow apart. Karzai thought the U.S. just didn't understand Afghanistan, and the U.S. felt like he was no longer a good-faith partner. And Biden's frustration with Karzai came to a head during two trips he took to Afghanistan, first in February of 2008, and then later when he was Barack Obama's vice president-elect in January 2009. Both meetings were pretty testy, but according to reporting, during dinner on his 2009 visit, tensions really reached a peak.
Karzai, Biden, and two other senators were sitting in the ARG palace in Kabul, which was Karzai's home, and they were sharing this lavish multi-course meal. And in between plates of lamb and rice, Biden really grilled Karzai about the level of corruption in the country, and he made it personal. He accused Karzai's brother, who was also an Afghan politician, of taking bribes and pocketing American cashmen for development. That made Karzai really upset. Not only did he deny Biden's accusations, but he turned it around and he accused the U.S. of being unconcerned about Afghan casualties.
For Biden, that was the last straw. He threw down his napkin, stood up, and said, this dinner is over. After nearly a decade of war in Afghanistan, it was this moment that Joe Biden's faith in the entire effort really began to waver. He'd seen deteriorating conditions, corruption in the U.S.-backed government, and thousands of civilian deaths. Many of those casualties were from U.S. airstrikes. Plus, the U.S. had so far failed to complete its basic mission. The Taliban was back, and Osama bin Laden was still at large.
And as a result, Biden started to question the effectiveness of the American military. He even started to doubt whether the U.S. could remake Afghanistan in its own image. Jonah Blank put it like this. You can be the most effective military in the world, but if you're propping up a predatory governor, then you're not actually achieving anything useful. And until you could get a reformed government that was part of the solution, then there wasn't really much point in asking for sacrifices from American service personnel and the taxpayers footing the bill if what you're propping up is a government that can't really stand on its own.
So just as Biden is becoming disillusioned with the war, he's also becoming vice president. That must have changed things for him, right? Yeah, finally as vice president, Biden was sitting at the strategy table with the commander-in-chief. And right away, Obama had an important choice to make. Should he send in more troops to fight the resurgence of the Taliban or not? As soon as Obama became president, he and Biden went over to the Pentagon and were given a briefing by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which essentially said that we were on the verge of catastrophic failure in Afghanistan. That if we didn't send more troops immediately, the war was going to be lost. That's Bruce Rydell, that CIA officer we heard from in part one.
He said the Pentagon and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were pushing for more troops, but Biden wasn't. He didn't think there was any chance that a robust counterinsurgency effort would succeed against the Afghan Taliban. In the end, President Obama went with Clinton. Biden was the outlier. But of course, as a good vice president, once the decision was made, he supported the president's decision.
And he even put on a smile for Hamid Karzai when he visited D.C. in 2010. Matter of fact, I'm the first, I think, American to spend any time with the president. Exactly. Five days or ten days after the Taliban fell. Without electricity. And he fed me then. So I'm returning the favor.
In public, Biden was very supportive of the surge. The president had a clear strategy. And because of the extraordinary sacrifice of our service members, the greatest fighting force the world has ever known, that strategy is succeeding. But privately, he was a little bit more candid. In the early spring of 2010, Joe Biden came to visit the rehab center and sit down and have dinner, a very nondescript, no-frills dinner with just a couple of wounded guys. Dan Brzezinski is a retired Army infantry officer I spoke to who was deployed to Afghanistan as part of the Obama administration's troop surge.
But eventually, he ended up suffering a major injury, and he was sent to Walter Reed. And that's when he had a chance to have dinner with Joe Biden. Joe Biden walks into the room, and to me, in person, seemed just like he had appeared on TV. Just a big smile over his face, a lot of energy. He pulls his chair out, grabs a napkin, unfolds it, sits down. And in true Joe Biden fashion, he sits down and he goes, man, I just met with the president of France. He is such a jerk. But Biden's honest approach to that conversation didn't end there. He also told Dan how he really felt about the war.
So here I am having dinner at the rehab facility, shoulder to shoulder with the vice president, knowing that my guys are fighting. And the vice president was asking questions about my experience. What did I think? What were the Afghan army soldiers that I partnered with? What were they like to work with? And I was just struck by the fact that he was asking me these questions and no one else really had. He said, I don't think we are waging this war the right way. I would like us to do it on a much smaller scale, much smaller footprint. And I think we should be focused on destroying terrorists with international criminal aspirations and not propping up the government of Afghanistan.
You know, after talking to so many different people about this, it's clear that Biden had an evolution on Afghanistan. You can really trace his change of heart from when the war started to where we are right now. Right. The same person who after 9-11 stood on the floor of the Senate and called for a billion dollars in nation building, who advocated for this larger U.S. military presence, and who stood with Obama as he surged tens of thousands of new troops to Afghanistan. After all of this, that same man at this point in our story has really started to believe that we needed to dramatically wind down the war. Arjun, I am so looking forward to talking to you in our final episode. Same here. I'll talk to you then.
In the closing episode of our series, I will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation of achieving a different outcome. This was not a peace agreement. This was an exit strategy that was dressed up as a peace agreement. That is the most logical, the most logical explanation of how so many in the intelligence community got this so wrong about what was going to happen in Afghanistan. This episode of Can He Do That was produced by Arjun Singh with help from Corey Suzuki. Editing is by Robin Amer, Sharla Freeland, Alison Michaels, Karen DeYoung, and Renita Jablonski. Sound mixing and design is by Merit Jacob. Logo art is by Greg Manifold. And a special thanks to Peter Finn, Greg Jaffe, Dan Balls, and Cleve Woodson.
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