Written by Joe Duffus
One of President Joe Biden’s offered justifications for the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan was that Trump made him do it. He was forced into it, he has argued, by the previous administration’s Doha Agreement with the Taliban, an accord negotiated in Qatar between the U.S. Government and the Taliban in February of 2020 under the Trump Administration. Is this true?
No. The Doha Agreement did not commit the Biden Administration to withdrawing by a set date and was nullified by the Taliban’s partnership with the terrorist Haqqani Network. Under the terms of the agreement, the United States promised to reduce the number of troops present in country and evacuate several military bases within 135 days of the beginning of the agreement. The U.S. would, however, only conduct a “complete withdrawal of all remaining forces” with the “commitment and action” of the Taliban on its obligations as laid out in the accord. Specifically, those terms bound the Taliban to “not allow any of its members, other individuals or groups, including al-Qaeda, to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies,” as well as “not to cooperate with groups or individuals threatening the security of the United States and its allies,” and to “prevent any group or individual in Afghanistan from threatening the security of the United States and its allies.”
Because of its partnership with the Haqqanis, the Taliban maintained documented ties to ISIS-K in violation of the agreement. During the hasty withdrawal two weeks ago, the Biden Administration permitted the Taliban to control security in Kabul, thus placing the Haqqanis in control of the airport security, leaving the airport vulnerable to attack. In turn, it was their allies in ISIS-K that perpetrated the attack on Hamid Karzai International Airport that killed 13 U.S. servicemembers and nearly 100 Afghans hoping to be evacuated for helping us.
It is plainly evident by the language of the accord that a final U.S. withdrawal was contingent on the Taliban upholding its end of the agreement, primarily preventing the areas of Afghanistan which it controlled from being used as a terrorist haven. The Taliban failed to do so, abrogating the agreement. Yet, President Biden continued with the withdrawal despite this evidence.
The Taliban has documented ties to the Haqqani Network and al-Qaeda. The Haqqanis are a jihadist group that “became a leading face of armed opposition to U.S. forces” and became a transnational “mafia” in war-torn Afghanistan. They have been designated a terrorist organization by the United States and they are a particularly radical and violent branch of the Islamist movement. A report submitted to the UN in May identified the Haqqanis as a “primary liaison actor” between the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
This was who the Taliban placed in charge of security in Kabul after taking control of the city. The Biden Administration therefore relied on the Taliban, and by extension the Haqqanis, for security outside the Hamid Karzai International Airport before the terror attack that killed 13 U.S. servicemembers.
The attack was attributed to the Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K), a “sworn enemy” of the Taliban, which officially condemned the attacks. However, the truth is much more complex. As mentioned, the Taliban have extensive connections to the Haqqani Network, and “experts have long suggested the Haqqani network lets the Islamic State-Khorasan carry out attacks that serve its own purposes but does not want to be associated with it.” Further, “Afghan officials have for years accused the Haqqani network of facilitating deadly attacks on civilians by providing Islamic State’s local affiliate with technical assistance and access to criminal networks in Kabul, even though Islamic State and the mainstream Taliban are sworn enemies. Such attacks include an assault by gunmen on a maternity ward in Kabul in May 2020 that killed 24 people, mostly women and children.”
So, knowing that beforehand, how could the Biden administration claim that the Taliban were not in violation of the agreement they used to justify the need for a rushed, chaotic bug-out from Afghanistan?
Biden claimed that the Trump-era Doha Agreement boxed him in: “When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Under his agreement, U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021.” “The choice I had to make, as your President, was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season.” He also emphasized that the timeline was limited because a ceasefire would not hold if he extended the withdrawal. Biden did not address what led to the chaotic scenes in the media or apparent lack of planning surrounding evacuation efforts.
Former Trump officials made clear that the Doha deal was conditions-based. The Taliban’s violations of the deal essentially nullified the agreement. Therefore, President Biden’s timeline was arbitrary and likely decided to for domestic political reasons.
Even with Biden’s arbitrary deadline, U.S. intelligence assessments warned of the instability of the Afghan government, especially as the Taliban continued to gain ground throughout the summer.
Douglas London, the “CIA’s Counterterrorism Chief for South and Southwest Asia before [his] 2019 retirement” and “volunteer with candidate Joe Biden’s counterterrorism working group,” claims that the intelligence community predicted the Afghan government to be unstable, and that it was possible, under the conditions President Biden created, for the government to fall in a matter of days. London asserts that Biden and his senior advisors made the mistake of believing that the Taliban’s best interests were served by adhering to the main points of the Doha Agreement, which was simply not the case.
