“We will not forget, we will not forgive,” those were Joe Biden’s words as America seemed to come to grips with the horror of the Kabul airport attack. The US withdrawal from Afghanistan is already being termed as the ‘Biden botch up’, and with good reason. While, in principle, most Americans will agree with the president’s decision to end what seemed like a never-ending war — 20 years and 2 trillion dollars, as he famously kept repeating — the manner in which the exit was executed was clearly flawed. So now when Biden says every one of the perpetrators will be hunted down, the question is how? How does America plan to hunt down members of an ideologically driven but disparate group like the ISIS-K, that too with no American intelligence or military assets on the ground? If America were to pass intel info onto the Taliban, what’s the guarantee that they will act on it? After all, for them, America is the greater enemy. Even if one were to buy the argument that an enemy’s enemy is a friend and that the Taliban needs to demonstrate its ability to govern in front of the international community, that does not mean they will kill their prodigal brothers even if it’s good for them in the short term. Killing is the Taliban’s forte, not in counter-terror or counter-intel operations.
The old adage in American politics goes, “no Democrat President can be seen to be soft on national security”. While Biden may be right that the terms of this exit were fixed by previous president Trump and not him, not only does Biden not have the luxury that Trump had, but he also needs to be seen as more right than right. This is why Clinton’s botch up in Kosovo is still remembered as a blot on his presidency. Whereas with Nixon, it was not Vietnam that brought about his downfall but Watergate. George W Bush never really paid the political price for the colossal blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the most poignant, no one could ever accuse Obama of being soft on terror because Bin Laden was killed on his watch. Something he never failed to remind the Republicans when he ran for a second term in 2012. This is Biden’s 2011 moment. He needs to be seen as catching ‘big fish’ if he needs to salvage the situation from here on.
Can Biden still salvage the situation? Of course, the world’s greatest military still has the means and the capability to avenge what happened to 13 American marines and dozens of other Afghans Thursday evening outside the Kabul airport. The bigger question is, will he walk the talk where it really matters. For years now the American establishment has known that the fount of all these terror groups is based in Pakistan. Yet for very well-known but not very defensible reasons, no American government has pushed the Pakistani establishment, particularly the military and the ISI. But Biden has no love lost for Pakistan either, shaped by his bitter experiences when he was the Senate Foreign Relations Chair and Musharraf was president. One reason why he hasn’t phoned Imran Khan yet, not once, even after seven months in office.
Biden still has three and half years to go and if no more American casualties occur, this is something the American public will forget very easily. His presidency, like most presidencies, will be decided by domestic matters and not so much by foreign policy. But he has to seek revenge and be seen to be doing so for the death of American soldiers in the Afghan drawdown. This is his moment of truth.
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