Why Has No One Been Held Accountable for Afghanistan?

AMAC Exclusive – By Simon Maas

Months after the Biden administration’s botched evacuation from Afghanistan, the situation inside the country continues to deteriorate, posing a threat to American security interests at home and abroad.

Last month, the Taliban told the U.S. during talks in Doha, Qatar, that if the United States wanted 2,000 troops at its embassy in Kabul, the Taliban would station 2,000 mujahideen (i.e., suicide bombers) to the Afghan embassy in Washington, D.C., according to a new report by the Middle East Media Research Institute. But even as the full scope of the disaster continues to grow, no one inside the White House or at the top levels of the military responsible for the U.S. defeat has been held accountable – leading to the question of whether anyone ever will.

Despite President Biden’s repeated assertions that his so-called “over the horizon” strategy would keep the Taliban and other terrorist groups in check, the reality is far from what Americans were promised. The Taliban’s warnings about sending suicide bombers to the U.S. capital came not long before Zabihullah Mujahid, a longtime Taliban spokesman and deputy minister for information and culture for the new Taliban regime, said the jihadist group will include suicide bombers as part of a new branch of special forces in the Afghan army.

Maulvi Mohammad Yaqoob Mujahid, the acting defense minister of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, also issued an identical threat on Twitter. He is the same person who told an Afghan media outlet in July that the Taliban was not obligated to sever its longstanding ties with al Qaeda under its agreements with the U.S.

Meanwhile, the Taliban is now hunting down Afghans who criticize the Taliban in person or on social media, according to media reports and human rights groups. This comes as women across Afghan society fear for their safety with the Taliban in power.

Even amidst all these blatant threats against the U.S. and obvious human rights violations, the Biden administration continues to “engage” the Islamist group through diplomatic channels – despite not officially recognizing the Taliban government.

But even as more and more horrifying details come to light – both about what’s happening inside the country and about the gross negligence and incompetence in the handling of the situation by our leaders – it becomes even starker that no U.S. senior national security officials have been held accountable.

In any other line of work outside government, people who made such egregious, destructive mistakes would have been fired without hesitation—but apparently not in the Biden administration.

This is a scandal that should concern every American: If the Afghan fiasco wasn’t enough, just how badly do the men and women charged with protecting America’s security need to screw up before the President makes changes?

To appreciate just how shocking it should be that no one was fired or even reprimanded for the botched U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan, it’s important to remember a few key facts about the situation there prior to the departure of U.S. troops.

When Joe Biden took office, the Taliban were reduced to hiding out in caves and struggling just to survive. Al Qaeda could no longer operate in the country, and the American-backed government was slowly gaining strength.

The U.S. had also reduced its military involvement in the country to primarily air support and resupply operations. Afghan security forces were doing most of the fighting on the ground, which is why no Americans had died in combat in the country between February of 2020 and August of 2021.

In a matter of days, Biden and his national security team managed to reverse all of that progress. The Taliban swept through the country, capturing billions of dollars of American military equipment – paid for by American taxpayers – and 13 American service members were needlessly killed in the chaos that engulfed Kabul in the final hours of the American ground presence there. In an ironic twist, Biden even had to send more troops back into the country to ensure that the evacuation did not devolve into a massacre.

The last U.S. troops left Afghanistan on August 30. Not all Americans were evacuated, and some are still trapped there.

Simply put, the war ended in defeat, and American prestige was damaged around the world. Longtime allies openly criticized the United States. The Biden administration’s retreat from Afghanistan was an unmitigated disaster — an astonishing display of shameless incompetence. Although many top aides and military advisors have since claimed that they voiced their opposition to Biden’s strategy of withdrawal, that does not change the fact that the withdrawal they oversaw was nothing short of a catastrophe.

Yet, to this day, no senior civilian or military leaders — the decision-makers who planned and oversaw the disaster — have been fired. Everyone has remained in their same positions of power and influence over American national security.

That includes Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his underlings at the State Department, which is responsible for helping U.S. citizens abroad amid a crisis. It also includes National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who has recently come under fire for not doing enough to secure the release of Americans held hostage abroad in both Afghanistan and other hostile countries.

Of course, President Biden is ultimately responsible for what happened and is still happening in Afghanistan. And while he may not fire anyone for their role in the defeat, the American people will have a chance to fire Biden in 2024 – and they may not be so forgiving of such incompetence.

Simon Maas is the pen name of a writer living in Virginia.