On May 24, 2000, under the cover of darkness, the IDF beat a hasty, chaotic retreat from Lebanon.
The withdrawal itself was long expected. The prime minister at the time, Ehud Barak, had campaigned successfully a year earlier on the promise to pull the troops back from Lebanon by July 2000.
But events on the ground overturned his plans. Rather than being done in an orderly fashion, the withdrawal was done overnight and in a disorderly manner as Hezbollah quickly overran positions Israel handed over to its allies the Southern Lebanon Army, and there was a massive refugee influx. A headline in The Guardian at the time told the story: “Chaos and humiliation as Israel pulls out of Lebanon.”
A week later, Barak gave an interview to Time magazine in which he defended the withdrawal and denied that it would have negative long-term ramifications for Israel.
“Once we are within Israel, defending ourselves from within our borders, the Lebanese government and the Syrian government are responsible to make sure that no one will dare hit Israeli civilians or armed forces within Israel,” he said. “Any violation of this might become an act of war, and it will be treated accordingly. I don’t recommend that anyone try us once we are inside Israel.”
Hezbollah, unfortunately, never got that memo. The terrorist organization tested the border immediately and constantly until the 2006 war, when Israel’s deterrence, lost by the withdrawal, was restored. Nevertheless, rockets have been fired from southern Lebanon over the last couple of weeks, and Hezbollah has grown its missile arsenal exponentially since the IDF withdrawal.
Barak’s defense of the withdrawal came to mind watching US President Joe Biden’s defiant defense on Monday of his decision to remove all US troops from Afghanistan, leading to the Taliban’s lightning takeover of the country, including the capital, Kabul.
“I am president of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me,” Biden said near the end of his 19-minute address from the White House in what – if that was all he had said – would have sounded like accepting responsibility for the heart-wrenching and tumultuous scenes at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, where people desperately scrambled to try to get on one of the planes leaving the country.
But that was not all Biden said, and much of what came previous to his “buck stops here” comment was to blame everyone but himself for the ghastly turn of events. He blamed his predecessor, Donald Trump, who negotiated a deal for a complete withdrawal of US troops that Trump hoped would have taken place three months earlier. He blamed the Afghan leadership and the Afghan fighters for not being willing to fight for their own country.
And Biden’s blame of those actors was well-placed. But it does not remove from him culpability for the chaos at the airport, or that some 300,000 Afghans who have helped the US and their allies in the country over the last two decades are now left at the Taliban’s mercy, or that the US – with the best-financed and best-equipped intelligence in the world – failed to predict how swiftly the Taliban would take over the country.
JUST FIVE weeks ago, in a press conference that definitely did not age well and will long be remembered and replayed because of comments that completely missed the mark, Biden said what everyone witnessed over the last couple of days would never transpire.
“Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable,” Biden was asked.
“No it is not,” he replied.
Asked if he saw any parallels between the US withdrawal from Saigon in 1975 and what could happen in Afghanistan, Biden replied, “None whatsoever. Zero.... The Taliban is not the North Vietnamese Army. They’re not – they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy.”
Right, people were not lifted off the roof of the US Embassy in Kabul, but two people were seen falling to their death while hanging on to the outside of a C-17 transport plane flying people out of the country.
And that is something for which Biden, and not his predecessor nor the Afghan leadership or army, is responsible.Biden obviously made his comments five weeks ago based on intelligence reports he was receiving at the time, intelligence that was just plain wrong. As a result, an orderly evacuation of US personnel and Afghans who assisted the US over the years was not carried out.
Trump may have planned the withdrawal, but Biden implemented it, and how it was implemented was a disaster for which he bears responsibility.
As Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton said Monday on Fox & Friends: “Joe Biden announced about four months ago that we would withdraw from Afghanistan. But there’s a difference between the decision to withdraw and how that decision was executed. Whatever you think of the first decision, the execution of Joe Biden has been recklessly negligent.”
Throughout his address, Biden repeated the argument that US soldiers should not be expected to fight for Afghan democracy if the Afghans are not willing to do it themselves. And there is strength to that point.
He also said no US national security interests were served by staying in Afghanistan, an argument less convincing. Predictably, as the US departed, the Taliban moved in. The vacuum is being filled, and – as is always the case in the Mideast – it is not being filled by the good guys.
Moreover, Taliban rule in Afghanistan will likely attract a flood of Jihadist terrorists who will use the country – much as Jihadists used Peshawar, Pakistan, in the mid-1980s – as a training ground for spreading terrorism around the region and the world.
Biden said the US mission when it went to war in Afghanistan to “degrade the terrorist threat of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and kill Osama bin Laden was a success.” And while it is true that al-Qaeda was degraded, the ideology that spawned it remains strong and potent, and it will just morph into a new, deadly organization – think Islamic State – with the same murderous ideology and now a rogue state to give it abundant cover.
When the US killed bin Laden, it took out the architect of the worst attack on the US homeland since Pearl Harbor. But it did not defeat the radical Islam that has transformed the region since the late 1970s – from Iran to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan to Lebanon.
Fundamentalist Islam, both of the Shi’ite and Sunni variety, is still very much alive and kicking, and it has now not only been emboldened by the Taliban takeover of a sovereign country, but it will now have a home base from which to operate undisturbed – just as Hezbollah did, and it grew and prospered in the process when the IDF pulled out of southern Lebanon in 2000.