President Biden has done a magnificent job channeling all manner of resources and war materiel to valiant Ukraine. He has been laser focused on making sure that the courageous defenders of Ukrainian freedom obtain what they need to keep Putin’s Russia from overrunning their country. If this week’s attempt by Ukraine to push Russia out of Kherson, in the south, and repulse the Russian drive toward Odesa, succeeds – even in part – doing so will reflect President Biden’s (and the US armed forces’) determination to annul Putin’s much advertised plan to subjugate a free people and a free nation.
Putin claims (propaganda for martial purposes) that Ukraine exists only because Russia created it. False! He asserts that the Ukrainian language is just a bad version of Russian. False!
What really drives him (as in 2014 and 2006) is that most Ukrainians – even before 2022 - wanted to detach themselves from Putin’s sphere of influence (Only Belarus, Tajikistan, and a few other captive “stans” want to stay inside). Putin wants to re-create the hegemony that was the misguided and over determined Soviet Union. Its fall, he says, was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
Putin was a minor apparatchik then, and somehow has come to see himself as a Josef Stalin or a Leonid Brezhnev re-born. In those avatars he imagines that he would be a well-respected world statesman, with the power to propose as well as dispose. Certainly, Putin has always reacted with hostility to President Obama’s implication that he and Russia were third-rate powers. Putin’s war is motivated almost entirely not for resource or monetary gain (although there may be some of that), but as a vanity project – as a means to restore to Russia, and thus to him, the supposed glory that was lost when the late President Mikhail Gorbachev dismantled the Soviet Union. (Putin wants somehow to resurrect everything Soviet that Gorbachev finally realized was bogus, and rotten to the core. Putin wildly calls Gorbachev a “romantic.”)
Glory is the right word, too. Putin desperately wants what was lost, or forfeited. Putin, alas, has waited for the West, and especially the United States, to grow weaker -- or less vigilant, at least in his eyes. By failing to beat him about the head when he leveled Grozny, battered Georgia, flattened Syria in cahoots with a nasty killer, and allowed him to march on Crimea and eastern Ukraine with hardly any consequences, we certainly fed his ego and upped his ambitions. At most, the West and the US tut-tutted when they should have condemned and acted. Never let autocrats, in this case preening kleptocrats, aggrandize without opposition or serious pay back. Make their actions costly, and shame them publicly.
A year ago Putin received one of his bigger boosts, and one that must have set his Machiavellian mind afire. President Biden abruptly, and counter to the advice of his military advisors, decreed a complete, immediate, pull out of all American forces from Afghanistan.
Biden was right to draw our operations down, after so many years of assiduous feeding the avaricious Afghan corruption maw. But he was wildly wrong to be so precipitous, and to do so despite the likely consequences. Putin took the withdrawal to mean that Biden was a secret Trump - a president who just wanted to bring the boys home, whatever the damning consequences. Putin was wrong to believe that, but Biden gave him every reason to think that Russia now had a royal flush, with Biden on the run.
This is what I wrote in the Boston Globe last year, on the eve of Biden’s fateful decision:
“When the United States abandons Afghanistan the Taliban will triumph. Kabul will fall. There will be no possibility of the civilian regime sustaining itself.
“When the Taliban leave, women will again be subjugated to patriarchal fervor. The Taliban will grow stronger and bolder. The ongoing civil conflict will escalate, and any kind of representative democracy will fall before the fundamentalist diktats of the Taliban.
‘This is President Biden’s first and most alarming foreign policy blunder, even given its undoubted domestic political benefits.
“Most of all Biden is throwing away our bargaining leverage. Pulling out of Afghanistan without so much as attempting to exact any kind of promises from the Taliban, violates a fundamental rule of how best to strike a bargain. He might have agreed to pull out of Afghanistan only if its leaders promised to leave schools for girls alone or promised to negotiate transparently with the outgoing government of Afghanistan. But those possibilities have been discarded.”
The Taliban might not have agreed to any restrictions, and almost certainly might have made promises, but not kept them. Their policies since the American forces fled Afghanistan are hardly designed to win support from the rest of the world. Nor are Taliban policies arranged to gain financial support from outside. Inside Afghanistan the hardline clerics have imposed ideological strictures that are both anachronistic and self-defeating. Why any country that hopes to prosper would dismiss at least one half of its potentially productive workers, and forbid the kind of education and training that would help to produce wealth and progress, is unfathomable. The great Muhammad was a reformer, but with a socially modern vision for his people.
For all of these reasons, Biden’s rapid departure from Afghanistan ill-served its people. Nor did it advance America’s reputation for balanced decision-making. It abandoned the many Afghans who were on our side, and deserted them in a peremptory fashion. Sad.
Most of all, it spurred Putin’s decision to go to war against Ukraine, something that he presumably had long been nurturing. The U.S. leaving Afghanistan may also have ramped up Xi Jinping’s thinking about Taiwan.
Whatever happens positively in Ukraine may help to wipe away the stain of the flight from Afghanistan. But Afghans themselves will still remain in thrall to the Taliban. An American failure.
Biden perhaps realizes that preventing Putin from depriving Ukrainians of freedoms and human rights partially rights the wrongs perpetrated by our head-long exodus from Kabul. We at least must continue now to secure the future of the peoples of Ukraine.
Regarding mistakes in Afghanistan, I blame the Durand Line.