The NPR Politics Podcast - After Two Decades And More Than A 150,000 Dead, America Has Left Afghanistan

Episode Date: August 31, 2021

The withdrawal effort managed to evacuate 124,000 people before the last U.S. service member left Afghanistan on Monday, ending nearly two-decades of American military presence in the country after the September 11th attacks.Tuesday at the White House, President Biden fervently defended his decision not to "extend the forever war," though touted America's remote warfare capabilities and told terror group ISIS-K: "We're not done with you yet."This episode: White House correspondent Asma Khalid, White House correspondent Scott Detrow, Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Last night in Kabul, the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. And I'm Scott Detrow. I also cover the White House. After 20 years, the last U.S. ground troops have now officially left Afghanistan, bringing a formal end to the longest war in American history. Just a bit ago, the president gave a speech from the White House to mark the moment. I was not going to extend this forever war. And I was not extending a forever exit.

The human cost of the war was devastating. More than 100,000 Afghan forces and civilians died in the conflict, along with more than 2,400 Americans and 1,100 coalition forces. That's all according to the Cost of War Project at Brown University. Not to mention, the financial price tag for the war topped $2 trillion. NPR's Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman is here again. Tom, thanks for joining us. Good to be with you.

So I want to start with the president's remarks themselves. You know, at times he seemed defensive in his speech that he gave. And I'm curious, what struck both of you about it? I mean, to me, it was that defensiveness. He sounded like somebody who he is. He's somebody who's being severely critiqued and criticized by members of both parties in Congress, by the media covering this. There was a point in the speech where Biden started, like, raising up hypothetical critiques of the choices he's made,

and then responding to them over and over. And as he took this defensive tone, you know, it was interesting how many other outside forces he blamed for what happened. The Afghan military, the Afghan government for collapsing relatively quickly and not putting up more of a fight against the Taliban. The Trump administration for initially agreeing to a withdrawal date. The previous administration's agreement said that if we stuck to the May 1st deadline that they had signed on to leave by, the Taliban wouldn't attack any American forces. But if we stayed, all bets were off. So we were 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. On and on. And then as he talked about the decision to leave while there are still some Americans in Afghanistan, he kept saying, this is what the Joint Chiefs told me to do. This is what the generals told me to do. So even though he kept saying, the buck stops with me, I take responsibility, he was certainly spreading the responsibility out a great deal today. No, I agree. It was incredibly defensive. And he was conflating the war with the evacuation so many times. He talked about, we'd have to send tens of thousands of more troops in. Well, that's not necessarily true.

You may have had to send thousands more in, perhaps to defend Bagram Air Base, a much larger base, so you could move people out of there. You could have worked with the Taliban to say, listen, you're not abiding by the agreement signed by the previous administration. You're attacking cities. You're still working with al-Qaeda. He could have been much harder on that point, I think. And he also talks about the Joint Chiefs said they all agreed to leave August 31st. What he didn't say was all military leaders said, don't take out the 2,500 troops right away. We can put more pressure on the Taliban, especially with the peace talks in Doha. We can help the Afghan forces with air power, with airstrikes. He didn't mention that at all. You know, there were many moments in this speech that reminded me of comments that he's made repeatedly over the last few weeks.

There were just repetitious lines. But there was a moment near the end where he spoke about the toll of war in terms of the number of veteran suicides, just the kind of like personal, emotional casualties. And that sounded very unusual from what we've heard from him to date. A lot of our veterans and their families have gone through hell. Deployment after deployment. Months and years away from their families, missed birthdays, anniversaries, empty chairs at holidays, financial struggles, divorces, loss of limbs, traumatic brain injury,

post-traumatic stress. We see it in the struggles many have when they come home. That part of the speech jumped out to my ears too. And it seemed to me almost that that was the speech Biden wanted to give all along, that he wanted to give when he initially made this decision. Biden talks so much on the campaign trail. He's talked so much in the early days of administration of wanting to be the person who followed through on ending the war, that he didn't want any more American troops in harm's way. Of course, the irony is that he presided over the final 13 soldiers, service members to be killed in Afghanistan and was at

Dover Air Force Base this weekend to meet with the families. But Biden also viewed this in a big strategic way of not being in America's national security interest and also trying to prove that American foreign policy was tied to Americans' interests and doing that by trying to bring soldiers back from Afghanistan, where they had been for 20 years, even though it was a much smaller presence. So it was almost that argument of this is why it wasn't worth it anymore. You heard at the end of the speech after that defensive tour through explaining all of the terrible twists and turns that have happened in August. Tom, you've covered this war from the outset. You have covered it in its entirety for the last two decades. So when you look at just what is the United States gained, would you say, or what does it have to show for the 20 years that it spent in Afghanistan?

Well, clearly, the country's in a better place if you look at, you know, economic opportunities for women and girls. If you look at a whole generation of young Afghans, men and women, that are educated, that worked with the Americans, their military, their commandos were quite good. They wanted to continue the fight. They were told by their government to surrender. They're still very much upset. But other than that, you still have al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan. Now you have ISIS presence. So the terrorist threat has been reduced.

But to say you can't be attacked anymore from Afghanistan, I think we'll have to wait and see. And you can't do an anti-terror effort without a good ally on the ground. You need that human intelligence. You need someone to help you about where the terrorist cells are. And now they've lost that. So it's going to be a real problem, I think, going forward. A lot of people say, you know, the U.S. should have left Afghanistan after bin Laden was killed, you know, 10 years ago. That didn't happen. I think a lot of people now are looking back at that and said that's when the U.S. should have left. But here's one other thing. Clearly, the U.S. did way too much in Afghanistan.

After the Soviets left, the U.S. did almost nothing. Now they've done probably too much. There was some sort of a sweet spot in the middle, a lot of people tell me. You help train some of the Afghans, you provide money for Afghanistan, but to spend a trillion dollars and send 150,000 US and Afghan troops there, that just never made any sense to a lot of people. It frankly wasn't worth it. You know, Scott, the president specifically praised the Afghanistan evacuation today in his remarks as well. Yeah, and I think of all the different reasons why the Biden White House has been incredibly

defensive over the past few weeks, maybe this is this is one where they do have more of a point. In the end, more than 120,000 people were flown out of the airport, something like 5,500 Americans, according to Biden today. You know, and I think this led to one of the more callous and really almost shocking remarks that Biden has made over the course of this and that interview with ABC News when he was asked about that horrific image of the 17-year-old boy and others falling from U.S. airplanes as they took off, as they tried to desperately hold on. And he said, that was several days ago, you know, reacting to this loss of human life in this horrible way like this. I think the Biden administration viewed those early images of people surrounding aircraft that couldn't take off as kind of really sticking to people's mind for a right reason. But as troops moved in and secured the airport, cargo plane after cargo plane after cargo plane was really taking off. And we were getting these regular updates. They were flying out

about a baseball stadium's worth of people every single day and continued to do that up until the very end. Of course, now one challenge that remains for the United States is to figure out exactly how to relocate everyone who did leave the country. All right, well, let's take a quick break. We'll talk more about this important day in history in just a moment. Support for NPR and the following message come from Verizon. Director of Corporate Social Responsibility Alex Cervelo shares how Verizon is helping schools bring technology into the classroom and working to move the world forward for all. We wanted to ensure that students and teachers have access to innovative learning tools and the proper training to successfully integrate them into the classroom,

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or, you know, just a little science curious. Subscribe now to Shortwave from NPR. And we're back. So, Tom, what happens now that U.S. troops have formally and officially left Afghanistan? Well, it's now up to the Taliban. It's a Taliban-run government. No one knows exactly how they're going to govern. They've made a lot of promises about women and girls continue to work or go to school.

One thing for the Biden administration is do they have diplomatic relations with the Taliban? Right now that's out of Qatar, but we don't know what will happen with a U.S. embassy presence, let's say, in Kabul. And another, maybe even a larger issue issue is how do you get out the remaining Americans who want to leave? And how do you get out the tens of thousands of Afghans who work for the U.S. government who want to leave too? During the evacuation, some of the Taliban checkpoints, they were preventing Afghans from going into the airport. So that's going to be a key issue going forward. Again, tens of thousands of Afghans who work for the U.S. government have been left behind. And Scott, you know, in terms of the Afghan refugees who are presumably going to be

resettled in the United States, we know that President Biden has directed the Department of Homeland Security to take the lead in resettling refugees. But what happens? I mean, you're talking about thousands and thousands of people. I think it's a complicated question. And it was one of the reasons why this resettlement was so slow to get off the ground, especially before it was a pressing crisis this summer. The Biden White House has repeatedly pointed to the fact that the Trump administration, which, as we covered extensively for four years, was very hostile to the idea of both legal and illegal immigration into the United States, had really slowed down the processing for that. We have seen the way that any sort of immigration conversation in Congress goes absolutely nowhere. There are

logistical challenges. There are philosophical disagreements. I think this is going to be something that's going to take a very long time to figure out. And you're going to end up having several conversations at once about what America owes Afghans who helped the US military about immigration in general. You know, a part of this withdrawal from the Biden White House was tied to the idea of symbolically being out of Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of September 11th. But Tom, as you look at the risk of a possible international terror attack today against the United States, is it different than where the country was 20 years ago? You know, it's hard to say. I keep hearing when these people say, well, America hasn't been

attacked in 20 years. And it kind of makes me cringe because it's almost like whistling past the graveyard. It's like we haven't been attacked. Well, you don't know where the attacks are going to come from. You don't know what's being planned there. And clearly the U.S. is now hardened, right, with Homeland Security, with TSA, with the military keeping an eye on things. So we're less open maybe to an attack, but it could come at any time from anywhere. And clearly the Taliban, they've been working with Al-Qaeda. I was there two years ago in Jalalabad and the Green Berets there said,

oh yeah, there's an Al-Qaeda presence in Eastern Afghanistan. And the Afghan forces were arresting Al-Qaeda operatives in the Western part of the country. So they're still there. The ISIS threat is something to keep an eye on. They're in Nangarhar province, hard against the Pakistan border. They are an enemy of the Taliban. But without the U.S. presence, it's going to be much harder to fight ISIS. Now, President Biden said they'll continue to go after ISIS. But again, if you don't have a good ally on the ground, if they're not adept at intercepting communications, let's say, it's going to be harder to find them. So look for them to gain strength in Afghanistan.

They were already recruiting at Kabul University, ISIS was. So keep an eye on that. You'll likely see ISIS start attacking the Taliban now. You know what, listening to you, Tom, I'm struck by how much things have changed and yet how much things at times kind of sound the same from where the United States was as a country 20 years ago. You know, listening to Biden talk about going after the threat of ISIS-K no matter what. We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down to the ends of the earth and you will pay the ultimate price. With language that seemed eerily reminiscent to the language we heard from George W. Bush after 2001.

Make no mistake, the United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts. I was especially drawn to that parallel because all summer I've been working on a special project all about 9-11, specifically about Flight 93, the plane that was headed to the Capitol before passengers and crews fought back and ended up crashing in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. I was putting the finishing edits on that piece as the war in Afghanistan ended. It was pretty strange. Yeah, I gotta imagine a strange juxtaposition. Well, that episode will be in the NPR Politics podcast feed on Friday. All right, well, let us leave it there for today. Tom, thanks so much for coming back on the show. You're welcome.

I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. And I'm Scott Detrow. I also cover the White House. And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.