Texas Public Policy Foundation Chief Executive Officer Kevin Roberts calls it “a debacle.”
The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has left enduring images of people falling to their deaths from departing airplanes, of mothers desperately handing their babies to strangers, hoping for a better life for them, he notes, as the Taliban has seized control of the country and American pride is wounded.
To make matters worse, a suicide bombing Aug. 26 killed 13 U.S. military members and at least 90 Afghanis.
Roberts spoke with K.T. McFarland, a former deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration, on the mishandled withdrawal for an episode of The Advance on Aug. 27.
“Truthfully, as I like to say, that is to say, we're not going to pull any punches. We're not picking on anyone,” Roberts said. “But this is a crisis that demands that every American, regardless of political affiliation, ask hard questions about American leadership, not just abroad but really anywhere.”
The final plane flew out of Afghanistan on Aug. 30.
Roberts said the Texas Public Policy Foundation is a nonpartisan entity and will not target President Joe Biden for political purposes. The foundation's website said its mission is "to build and promote conservative public policies."
“I’m here to announce the completion of our mission in Afghanistan,” Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth McKenzie said in a virtual briefing. “The last C-17 took off at 3:29 p.m.”
Roberts added, “Having said that, and I say this as a historian of American politics, it is difficult for me to think of other episodes in American history that are this tragic, this embarrassing and this unnecessary.”
McFarland said the deaths of Americans in uniform has added immensely to the problem.
“Put politics aside, it's just a gut punch when you think of the brave Americans who have sacrificed their whole careers for the good of the United States and our allies to see them now have this tragic unfolding of events in Kabul at the airport,” she said. “And I agree it was unnecessary. And that doesn't diminish the sacrifice and the nobility of the service to the United States.
“[To] all the families who are affected to everyone who has a connection to the United States military, really hats off to you,” McFarland said. “I'm a Navy mom myself, and I just can't imagine what some families are going through right now and may continue to go through for the next couple of weeks. But God bless you all and thanks of a grateful nation.”
She said it appears some U.S., citizens will not be safely evacuated.
“And it's for a couple of reasons. One, because the American citizens may not want to leave because let's say they're married to an Afghan or they have Afghan children and don't want to leave their family,” McFarland said. “We’ve totally got that, but the other reason is because there are American citizens all across the country. Three days ago we were saying to all Americans, get to Kabul, get to that Kabul airport, you're going to get on a plane. Then we saw what the bombings, the Kabul airport wasn't safe.”
She has spent a lot of time in Afghanistan over the years and said there are Americans in many locations, teaching school, installing solar-powered wells and performing other needed jobs.
“We've got a pocketful of an American groups all over the country and they have no way of getting out because they don't have armed guards,” McFarland said. “They don't even have cars probably to drive them, even if they could go from wherever they are into Kabul. I was just watching the Pentagon press briefing, and they cannot guarantee that there won't be more terrorist attacks at the airport and at other places.”
She said there is a risk some Afghans may be taken as hostages. Will the U.S. have to shoot its way out? Will some Americans be trapped in the midst of a firefight?
“The situation in Afghanistan is really bad right now, but I worry that in the next two or three weeks, it gets worse in Afghanistan,” McFarland said.
She said another concern is that the Taliban appears unified, but that might not last.
“The Taliban isn't one group. It's about five different tribal groups, all sort of being affiliated with the Taliban,” McFarland said. “Sometimes they're affiliated with ISIS. They're affiliated all over the place. They switch their loyalties all the time. They seem to be united right now. But in about 48 hours, they'll start fighting with each other. Each one of those groups is backed by us, backed by China, one by Pakistan, one by Iran, one by Russia. So they will start kind of going at each other in a multisided civil war.”
She also expressed concern that the Taliban will seek out and punish Afghans who worked with the U.S. That could be grim, McFarland said.
Roberts asked if this humiliating defeat started Jan. 20 when Biden took office. McFarland suggested it was appropriate to look back two decades.
“We had every right to go in after Sept. 11 and kill Al Qaida and anybody who attacked Americans," she said. "And we did. We did it with a small group of special forces and we did it brilliantly. We adapted. We changed it in three months. We got Al-Qaida surrounded. They were down to like 200 fighters, including Osama bin Laden. And we had them with their backs up against the Hindu Kush mountains, the mountains that separate Afghanistan from Pakistan. Instead of finishing them off right then and there, somehow and who knows how, we let them slip through our fingers, through the tunnels and the caves in those mountains.”
McFarland said the major mistake was relying on Pakistan to complete that mission, while we turned our attentions to nation building. That, she said, was a “huge mistake” that resulted in disaster.
“And then for 20 years, American generals trotted up to Capitol Hill and they said, ‘You know, a few thousand more American servicemen, a couple more billion dollars, maybe another six months or a year, we're going to have that Afghan military really in great shape.'" McFarland said. "We're going to have a good government to have elections going to be fair. It's been wonderful."
“And yet for 20 years, it was never going to happen and they knew it," she added. "We had intelligence failures where the intelligence community, which had missed Al-Qaeda in the first place. And they missed everything that's happened in Afghanistan in the last two decades. They missed just about everything in between. I fault our political leaders, Republicans and Democrats, who kept sort of pushing us on mission impossible, the Afghan military.”
McFarland said training the Afghans was virtually impossible, in part because the majority of recruits were illiterate. In addition, tribal alliances were stronger than any pull to unite as a single country.
She said someone was willing to try a new approach — former President Donald Trump.
McFarland said she is a “card-carrying member” of the Republican foreign policy establishment, having worked for Henry Kissinger and in the Reagan administration.
“I was sort of right in the middle of that foreign policy establishment as you could get. And yet I looked at the last 20 years of failure in American foreign policy,” she said. “And so I've supported Donald Trump and I abandoned a lot of them, our traditional Republican candidates for president. He had a plan and they negotiated the plan.
“And the plan rested on we're going to get out. We know that. But he went to the leader of the Taliban. The guy is now supposedly running the country,” McFarland said. “And he said, ‘We know where you live. We know where your family lives, where your children live. And you harm the hair, one hair of an American, and we are coming to get you and your extended family, and we are going to wipe you out.'”
She said that sounds harsh — but that's exactly the kind of language the Taliban needed to hear. That’s why a deal was signed in February 2020.
“And as a result, we had a plan," McFarland said. "American citizens were leaving. We were slowly but surely, with no fanfare, getting Americans out of there with the idea that we would be out completely by May of this year. And that was the schedule that was conditions based. If we had any problem that they were going to take American hostages, we were going to go come and get them. We were not just going to leave no matter what. It was a series of sort of milestones they needed to reach as we left.”
She said the Biden administration hated everything Trump did and altered a process that was working. That led to the tragedies of the last two weeks.
“They were just sort of like allergic response to anything Trump proposed that they were going to just do the opposite. They weren’t even going to analyze to see whether it made sense to do the opposite,” McFarland said. “They just did the opposite. So Biden comes in and instead of continuing to take Americans down, they added Americans. They put Americans back in and they stopped taking anybody out.”
She said Biden abandoned the May deadline and extended it to September.
“Trump’s ‘dopey deadline’ of May was chosen very deliberately, which is the Afghans don't fight 12 months a year,” McFarland said.
She said they are often in the mountains, in caves, at their farms. The change was intentional and wrong. It led to a debacle.