On Sunday, defending the catastrophic American withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden said confidently, “I think that history is going to record this was the logical, rational and right decision to make.” Perhaps. But the Taliban is anything but logical or rational.
The debacle unfolding in Afghanistan is one of the great American humiliations I’ve witnessed in my lifetime.
I was only nine years old during the Saigon collapse under president Gerald Ford. But I still have vague recollections of it, including watching forlorn Vietnamese doing everything to get onto American helicopters so that their lives would be saved from the bloodthirsty North Vietnamese Communists who would eventually go on to murder some two million of their fellow countrymen.
But even I could not have imagined Afghani civilians grabbing the wheels of giant American jets and falling to certain death just to escape the clutches of the Taliban, in scenes all too reminiscent of the terrible choice faced by the Twin Towers “jumpers” 20 years ago on 9/11.
The horrible fate awaiting Afghan women especially under the Taliban should sicken every American of conscience. I’m stunned by the silence of the world’s human rights organizations and the UN, who bore witness to the brutality of the Taliban and know it to be a monster whose first targets are women.
The botched American pullout, leaving America looking weak, incompetent and desperate, has only emboldened the Taliban to tighten its reign of terror, knowing the Biden administration has decided to cut and run. America and the world must make it clear to the Taliban that attacks on women will be met with attacks on the Taliban leadership.
Instead, it appears, the Taliban has zero fear of Biden and his administration, who have been reduced to begging the Taliban to allow Americans to leave.
Perhaps it’s time for Biden to stop talking about how logical and rational he is and instead discover his inner Trump crazy.
Secretary of state Henry Kissinger regularly told world leaders with whom he was negotiating that Richard Nixon was crazy and liable to do the most dangerous things in foreign policy. His arguments became part of the “madman theory” of diplomacy, where America’s enemies fear us because they fear an impulsive, unhinged leader willing to do something insane.
Wikipedia expresses it as follows: “The madman theory is a political theory commonly associated with US president Richard Nixon’s foreign policy. Nixon and his administration tried to make the leaders of hostile Communist Bloc nations think he was irrational and volatile. According to the theory, those leaders would then avoid provoking the United States, fearing an unpredictable American response....
“In 1517, Niccolò Machiavelli had argued that sometimes it is ‘a very wise thing to simulate madness’....
“Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, wrote that Nixon had confided to him: ‘I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, “for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry – and he has his hand on the nuclear button” and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.’”
President Donald Trump cultivated this image persuasively. His critics would say he is actually crazy. But ask yourself this question: Would the Taliban have attempted a complete takeover of Afghanistan if Trump – who didn’t just threaten but actually pulled the trigger on Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian Quds Force terrorist leader – were still in office? I suspect even Trump’s biggest detractors might hesitate before saying yes.
What all the world’s terrorist organizations bank on is rational Western leaders who will think through every possibility before they take strong military action. People did not expect Trump to move the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, because rational reasoning dictated that the Arab street would erupt in violence. It’s the reason that every president from Bill Clinton to Barak Obama hesitated before implementing what had been official American policy since 1994. As for the elimination of Soleimani, the fear was much greater that Iran would strike back decisively against American interests.
No doubt that is exactly what’s happening in the Biden administration now. Yes, I’m well aware that the Trump administration negotiated the peace agreement with the Taliban, and that Barak Obama before him negotiated a timetable for a complete American withdrawal which he then was forced to change. I’m also well aware that the vast majority of Americans are sick and tired of American blood and treasure being expended in Middle East wars. But I would venture to say that Americans are even more sickened by the current images in Kabul and the thought that 3,000 American soldiers died for what ended up being no tangible gain in Afghanistan, let alone witnessing billions of dollars of American military equipment falling into the hands of the murderous Taliban ogres.
In domestic policy Trump’s biggest liability often seemed to be his impulsiveness on Twitter and in public statements. But in foreign policy it might have been a strong strategic advantage. And Biden better think of something determined and decisive to show the Taliban he means business, lest the world conclude that he is far too professorial, like Obama before him, to show bold foreign policy leadership.
My friend Bret Stephens wrote critically in The New York Times in August of 2019 against both the Democratic and Republican desire to withdraw completely from Afghanistan and the tragedy that might eventuate should the United States choose to do so.
“What about the case for ending a long war?” he asked. “That’s always desirable, and every death in war is a tragedy. But a hawk might also note that the US endured just 14 fatalities in Afghanistan in 2018, and that a US service member is far more likely to die in a training accident than in combat. At some point, describing our current involvement in the country as a ‘war’ stretches semantic credibility when compared to past US conflicts.... Against the human (and budgetary) cost of our presence in Afghanistan, hawks would tally the cost of withdrawal. Even liberals like former defense secretary Leon Panetta criticized Obama for withdrawing too hastily from Iraq, thereby creating the power vacuum that ISIS quickly filled. It was a fiasco that ended only when Obama was forced to return US troops to Iraq a few years later.”
When I lived in the UK for 11 years as rabbi at Oxford, I often visited the US Air Force troops that had been stationed in the country since the Second World War. I similarly visited American military installations in Germany that have also been there for the past 75 odd years. When I visited Korea, I saw the enormous American bases that have been there since the Korean conflict 70 years ago, and North Korea is, for now, much more dangerous than even the Taliban, given that it is armed with nuclear weapons. Yet not many Americans have called for the bases there to be closed, which raises the question why an American military presence of some 2,500 in Afghanistan had to be closed right now in such an irreversible debacle.
APPROXIMATELY HALF a decade ago I worked with Jewish mega-philanthropist Miriam Adelson to save the lives of two Afghani Muslim women and their families – Zakia Ali and Fatima Kazimi – who faced lethal retaliation at the hands of religious extremists.
Zakia’s moving and highly romantic story was brought to world attention by New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning Kabul bureau chief Rod Nordland, who wrote a series of outstanding front-page articles in the Times about Zakia and her husband Mohammed Ali’s plight as a modern Afghani Romeo and Juliet. His reporting, including my involvement, which he described as involving “lobbying at the highest levels of the United States government to intervene on her behalf,” culminated in a book titled The Lovers: Afghanistan’s Romeo and Juliet, the True Story of How They Defied Their Families and Escaped an Honor Killing.
As Joel Pollak wrote in Breitbart this week, “Rabbi Boteach became ‘consumed’ by their case. He and Adelson also worked to rescue Kazimi, ‘who was the head of the Bamian Women’s Ministry’ and ‘who came under threat after helping Zakia.’”
And all of those efforts that Miriam and I expended to save the lives of these two Afghani families were while the United States was still a strong military presence in the country. I shudder to think of the plight of the Afghani women now that we have departed.
The writer, ‘America’s rabbi,’ is the best-selling author of 30 books, including most recently Holocaust Holiday: One Family’s Descent into Genocide Memory Hell. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter @RabbiShmuley.