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.

