Robert Gates, who served as defense secretary under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama , wrote in a 2014 memoir that Joe Biden “has been …
Robert Gates, who served as defense secretary under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, wrote in a 2014 memoir that Joe Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” President Biden ’s surrender of Afghanistan to the terrorist Taliban vindicates Gates’s grating assessment. By spurning the advice of his civilian and military advisers, Biden must shoulder the blame for the international humiliation wrought on the United States by the terrorist capture of Afghanistan. There was no strategic or domestic imperative for Biden to order a hasty and total pullout of the U.S. force that had been drastically cut, as he admitted over the weekend, to the “bare minimum of 2,500” before his predecessor, Donald Trump, left office. The small U.S. force could have been easily sustained with relatively modest cost and little risk to American lives. Not a single American soldier had been killed in fighting in the past more than a year and a half, essentially because only Afghan soldiers were on the frontlines since the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan ended on Jan.1,2015. The residual U.S. force was essentially playing a supporting role. Yet Biden rebuffed his top military commanders’ advice in April and ordered all American troops to rapidly return home. Biden also ignored the report of the bipartisan Afghanistan Study Group that recommended a conditions-based withdrawal while warning that a hurried, unconditional military exit would “leave America more vulnerable to terrorist threats” and have “catastrophic effects in Afghanistan and the region.” In fact, an unclassified version of the U.S. intelligence community’s global threat assessment had warned in April that, “The Taliban is likely to make gains on the battlefield, and the Afghan Government will struggle to hold the Taliban at bay if the coalition withdraws support.
