10 | SEPTEMBER 2 • 2021
PURELY COMMENTARY
essay
The Folly of Hasty Withdrawals
— Both America’s and Israel’s
L
ike every national
leader, the president of
the United States has a
prime obligation to safeguard
the security and well-being of
his citizens.
And like his
predecessor,
Donald Trump,
President Joe
Biden concluded
that the presence
of U.S. troops
and contractors
in Afghanistan
was having the opposite effect
— that the American military
deployment, as Biden put it
on Aug. 16, was “not in our
national security interest.”
Thousands of Americans
had lost their lives in the
course of the 20-year war
since the Sept. 11, 2001, ter-
rorist attacks, when the Bush
administration began targeting
Afghanistan for harboring
al-Qaeda terrorists. And
Biden, inheriting an agreement
to withdraw the last few thou-
sand U.S. troops, decided to go
ahead with it and, as he said,
avoid a “third decade” of war.
ISRAEL’S EXPERIENCE
Before we get into the pro-
found and dismal wrong-
headedness of this decision
— which in a matter of a few
days has seen the United States
humiliated and weakened in
the eyes, most especially, of its
Islamist enemies — we should
note that Israel has twice in
recent decades carried out its
own hasty military withdraw-
als on our very own doorstep,
under circumstances and with
consequences it has to some
extent lived to regret.
We left southern Lebanon
unilaterally in 2000, under
public pressure amid the
relentless loss of soldiers’ lives
in the Security Zone, and
were plunged into the Second
Lebanon War six years later.
Now we face a full-fledged
Hezbollah army on that front.
We left Gaza unilaterally
in 2005, choosing neither to
negotiate the pullout with
the Palestinian Authority nor
to heed the warnings that
emboldened terror groups,
claiming vindication, would
fill the vacuum. Now we face
endless friction and inter-
mittent bloody conflict with
Hamas.
Israel, in other words, is not
immune to the urge to cut and
run.
And that is what the
United States has now done
in Afghanistan, to devas-
tating effect. It has handed
Afghanistan back to the
Taliban — brutal and benight-
ed Islamic fundamentalists
who, when they last controlled
the country, oppressed women
with a methodical viciousness
unparalleled by any other
regime worldwide; indiscrim-
inately massacred civilians;
restricted education; destroyed
agriculture; banned culture
and recreation.
In consigning Afghanistan
to its grisly fate, moreover, the
U.S. has shown itself to have
been incapable of forging the
Afghan military into a com-
petent fighting force, despite
all the training, the tens of
billions in equipment, the lives
lost.
And while Biden now
blames Afghanistan’s political
leaders for fleeing, and the
Afghan army for laying down
its arms, the U.S. also reveals
itself to have been unable to
recognize the unreliability of
its Afghan allies. As recently
as July 8, Biden asserted with
outrageously misguided com-
placency that “the likelihood
there’s going to be the Taliban
overrunning everything and
owning the whole country is
highly unlikely.”
ISRAELI SELF-RELIANCE
For Israel, the debacle is a
reinforcement of our insistence
that we, and we alone, put our
lives on the line in the defense
of this country — even as we
forge and nurture our allianc-
es with our vital allies, and
none more so than the United
States. We do not and must
not ask U.S. or any other forces
to risk their lives for us, and
we dare not rely on any other
country or alliance to protect
us from our enemies.
For Israel and its allies
and semi-allies in the region,
the U.S. mishandling of
Afghanistan also shocks and
horrifies because it gives suc-
cor to terrorist groups and
extremist regimes. First and
foremost of these is Iran, clos-
ing in on the nuclear bomb,
toying with the U.S. in nego-
tiations over a return to the
2015 nuclear deal, determined
to destroy “Little Satan” Israel,
and now even more contemp-
tuous of the “Great Satan.”
For the United States, how-
ever, what’s ultimately worst
about the abandonment of
Afghanistan to some of the
darkest forces on the planet
is that it negates, rather than
serves, that core presiden-
tial obligation to ensure the
security and well-being of the
American people. The U.S.
deployment had been greatly
scaled back, and the losses, still
of course, terrible, reduced to
a fraction of those in earlier
years.
The hapless departure and
David
Horovitz
Times of
Israel
continued on page 12
AFP/TIMES OF ISRAEL
Taliban fighters stand guard in
a vehicle along the roadside in
Kabul on Aug. 16, 2021.