Biden's Afghanistan Critics Are Making Bad Faith Arguments About The Withdrawal

No, we shouldn't have "evacuated American civilians first" and here's why.

The line I keep seeing repeated on Twitter and from various pundits and other charlatans over the Afghanistan troop withdrawal goes something like this:

“Why oh why oh why would Biden withdraw troops before getting all American civilians out?” Brief gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. “Why oh why oh why wouldn’t Biden evacuate all the Afghan people who helped us over the past two decades before withdrawing the troops???”

(This is being replaced rather quickly with angry politicization of the US troops who died in yesterday’s terror attack but we’ll get to that later).

Basically, it’s a statement that sounds reasonable on its face but is, in fact, a very bad faith argument. Nobody stops to ask who the Americans remaining in Afghanistan were or why they were still there. But it’s crucial to understanding the situation.

The remaining Americans in Kabul and Afghanistan were comprised of several groups. These were by and large private contractors, other support staff, diplomats and journalists. The private contractors were there to help prop up the Afghan government and its security forces and the intention was for these Americans (and other foreign nationals) to remain after troops were pulled out in order to help support the Afghan government.

We did not expect the Afghan government that we had helped prop up for two decades to fall overnight. We expected the Afghan security forces to put up a fight. Private contractors remained in Afghanistan to help them carry out that mission. These were not American tourists out on holiday at the Four Seasons Kabul. These were people working on the same mission as our troops.

Perhaps it was foolish to believe that the Afghan government could hold the line once troops were withdrawn, but it was still the basic presumption going into this and it would have made zero sense whatsoever to evacuate these people prior to a troop withdrawal when they were there to offer continued support. When everything went FUBAR that calculus changed—but by then it was too late.

As to the Afghan people who helped us during our long occupation and failed attempt at nation-building, these were the people who were supposed to remain in Afghanistan to run things, to run the government and man the security forces and all the rest. Again, the operating presumption was that there would be some form of Afghan government in place once we exited and these were the people who were going to run it.

Do Americans—the same nativists in particular who scream foul whenever talk of refugees takes place, both from our neighbors to the south but especially from Muslim countries—really believe that we could have evacuated all the Afghan citizens who helped us? The entire Afghan government and all the security forces essentially? All the families of these people? Are you really going to argue with a straight face that prior to the troop withdrawal we should have essentially dismantled everything we built and shipped tens of thousands (or more) Afghan citizens over to the United States leaving nothing behind?

Indeed, even when we discuss the guns and vehicles and so forth left behind in Afghanistan we seem to forget that much of that was intended for the Afghan security forces and government to use to help bolster them against the Taliban and ISIS and so forth. We didn’t take all of it precisely because it was intended for our allies in Afghanistan. That it’s fallen into the wrong hands, that the government has collapsed, that chaos has broken out is all very shitty, no doubt, but it’s pretty disingenuous to argue that we should have essentially dismantled the entire thing prior to leaving. But hey, it all sounds great in hindsight.

Partisan hacks and frustrated hawks are crowing loud and I worry Biden will indeed buckle under the pressure. He looked old and tired and beaten down in his latest press conference. He vowed “revenge” for the bombings, whatever that means. Nothing good, I imagine. Things will get worse before they get better.

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