‘A Catastrophic Failure of Western Policy’: UK Lawmakers Slam Biden’s Afghan Decision
(CNSNews.com) – Senior lawmakers in Britain, one of America’s closest allies, this week lashed President Biden’s decision to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan and the manner in which it was done, decrying the impact on the Afghan people and the signals sent to adversaries of the West.
The criticism during a House of Lords debate came from across the political spectrum, including from strong admirers of the United States, a former defense and foreign secretary, and a former army chief of staff.
“The manner and timing of the Afghan collapse is the direct result of President Biden’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of 9/11,” said Richard Dannatt, a retired general and former chief of general staff of the British Army.
“At a stroke, he has undermined the patient and painstaking work of the last five, 10, 15 years to build up governance in Afghanistan, develop its economy, transform its civil society and build up its security forces,” he said. “The people had a glimpse of a better life, but that has been torn away.”
Britain, one of the first allies to join Operation Enduring Freedom launched by the United States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, sent a total of 150,000 military personnel to Afghanistan over the next two decades.
Britain sustained the largest number of fatalities in Afghanistan among America’s coalition allies – 457 – while more than 2,100 troops were wounded in action.
NATO went into Afghanistan after invoking article five of the North Atlantic Treaty – which states that that an attack on any member is considered an attack on all – for the first and only time in the alliance’s history.
The allies’ presence was tied to that of the U.S., and under the principle of “in together, out together” Biden’s decision announced in April to draw down the last of the 2,500 U.S. troops then in Afghanistan by September 11 meant the 7,000 troops from NATO allies and partner countries were also pulled out.
“With U.S. forces withdrawing,” Dannatt said, “other NATO allies, including ourselves, had no option but to leave too, denying the Afghan national army the technical and training support that it needed and the moral support of friends who encouraged them to take the fight to the Taliban.”
“Until a few weeks ago, the Taliban was being contained and may even have been persuaded over time that a military victory was impossible and a negotiated settlement was the better course,” he said. “Those possibilities are now a closed chapter of history, an opportunity lost, and the world’s Western superpower is looking enfeebled.”
Philip Hammond, a Conservative who served as defense secretary from 2011-2014 and foreign secretary from 2014-2016, also expressed frustration and puzzlement.
“What has happened now is a catastrophic failure of Western policy, and, more particularly, U.S. policy,” he said, agreeing with Dannatt that “once the U.S. decided to leave, it was inevitable that no other partner in the coalition could safely deploy modest numbers of troops effectively in the theatre.”
Hammond, too, argued that having a small number of international troops in Afghanistan was achieving the deployment’s purpose.
“I confess that I do not understand the reason for this decision,” he said. “Since the end of combat operations in 2014 and the drawdown of forces, we were deploying relatively small numbers of troops, at relatively small cost, and delivering a hugely leveraged effect on the ground in Afghanistan – denying space to terrorists to organize and excluding our strategic challenges from exploiting the situation in that country.”
Hammond said it seemed to him that Biden made the decision “out of a sense of political tidy-mindedness – we need to close a file, we need to draw a line.”
“I fear that that tidy-mindedness is a Western disease that is unsuited to modern asymmetric military conflict, which is messy and enduring,” he said. “Our strategic adversaries understand that – they thrive on messy compromise, ambiguous outcomes and frozen conflicts. The Western alliance has brought this catastrophe on itself to save a very small-scale deployment.”
‘Jihadists worldwide will celebrate’
Chris Bryant of the opposition Labour Party described Biden’s remarks about Afghan soldiers “some of the most shameful comments ever from an American president,” while Donald Anderson, another Laborite, expressed the view that “President Biden, alas, will be diminished, certainly abroad.”
“Our adversaries will be emboldened, the jihadists worldwide will celebrate, and there is a loss of trust in our pledged word and our ability to stay the course,” Anderson lamented.
Daniel Hannan, a Conservative strongly supportive of the United States – he has spoken several times at CPAC and the Heritage Foundation – quoted an excerpt of a speech President Richard Nixon gave in 1970, in the context of the conflict in southeast Asia:
“If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world."
“Who can doubt that he was right?” Hannan asked. “How do the decision and the events of last week look from Beijing or Moscow, the two great illiberal powers having just conducted a massive set of joint exercises in north-western China?”
“Has it not emboldened every tinpot tyrant from Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua to Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, partly because they are no longer in awe of the English-speaking powers?”
Patrick Goodenough CNSNews https://www.cnsnews.com/feed/blog
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