Victor Davis Hanson: Biden’s Afghanistan Withdrawal Destroyed American Deterrence

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the latest edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Jack Fowler: It is five years since, I don’t know if it’s today or yesterday or the last few days, five years ago, roughly around now, that Joe Biden commenced the bugout of Afghanistan. I don’t remember any of the generals at the time, or any military leaders, saying, “I’m resigning because this is just going to be a horrific outcome for the United States and for the world.”  

But Biden did what he did. He praised it. “This was great. Look what we did.” 

And your thoughts five years out, Victor? 

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, it was the greatest military humiliation, and I think as great or greater than the 1975 flight from the American Embassy in Vietnam of the last few American advisors, troops, and Vietnamese, and the boat people that followed. We had been there 20 years. 

Joe Biden reportedly, allegedly, wanted to get out by 9/11 because he was going to broadcast that he was the first president to end the misadventure, he thought, in Afghanistan. 

And we should remember at the time that Donald Trump had negotiated a withdrawal down to about 3,500 troops, and he was going to take the $300 million remodeled Bagram Air Force Base, which was defensible, I think 60 or 70 miles from Kabul, and basically control the airspace of all those critical nexus of power, whether it’s Pakistan, India, China, Russia. You had this huge recently remodeled base. 

In addition to that, we had just put a billion dollars into the American Embassy. A billion dollars. And [Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman] Mark Milley spent the summer, along with [Secretary of Defense] Lloyd Austin, misinforming, in Fauci style, to us that, and they assured us that the, what, 350,000-person Afghan Army was viable. “Don’t worry, it’s viable.” And it wasn’t. 

So once they heard that we wanted to get out and get out quickly with no conditions, and we weren’t going to do it from Bagram, which they couldn’t touch because they would have had to go out in the country and surround that place, and there was no way they could have entered and disrupted the flights.  

But once they heard it was gonna be in Kabul, and once they knew that we were gonna run away, and once they saw that there was multi… The figure is controversial. The top figure I’ve seen is fifty billion, the lowest is seven billion. But it depends on the cost of transporting those weapons over there, maintaining them, and replacing them, etc., and the maintenance personnel involved in storing them. 

But whatever it was, a multibillion-dollar gift of some of the latest weaponry, from small arms to machine guns to rockets to helicopters to heavy trucks to armored vehicles, and we gave it to the worst terrorists in the world.  

And they opened a terrorist mart, so to speak, and those weapons have been showing up everywhere, that they’re selling to their fellow Islamist terrorists. 

And it could have all been avoided. It could have all been avoided, and they lied to us repeatedly. 

And that one incident, coupled with DEI, at the same time they were doing that, they were testifying at Congress—the head of naval operations, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Army chief of staff—they were all telling us that they were reading Professor [Ibram X.] Kendi. He’s in the news again, audience.  

They were reading his books, and there was systematic racism in the wake of the George Floyd riot, and they were gonna ferret it out, and they could assure Congress that they had fully implemented diversity, equity, inclusion. 

And the result of that humiliation and no contrition about it and the DEI new protocols that would, what, privilege race and gender and sexual orientation over merit in terms of recruitment, promotion, advancement, etc. All of that led to a 40,000- to 50,000-person shortfall. 

And as soon as we got a confident military again, and as soon as we dropped the DEI racial prejudice and sexual prejudice and gender prejudice, as soon as we did that, guess what? We more than met all of our recruitment goals. 

But there was one other footnote to this, Jack. That was the point of August 2021 that Joe Biden had a honeymoon. He had been kept away during the campaign. Nobody had seen the level of cognitive decline. They were just starting to see it. He was in carefully-scripted Jen Psaki press conferences. “I’ll circle back on that. I’ll circle back on that question.” Stonewalling. 

But after that, he never got over 50% again. People just… And then they started reading what we were doing. We had a $80 million gender studies program at the University of Kabul in a traditional Islamic society. We were like British colonialists trying to, you know, not bring the rule of law and the end of suttee in India, but crazy stuff. 

And then there were George Floyd posters we saw on the streets of Kabul that we had sponsored artists. And then, I think, he went to the website. I guess it was superimposed, a Pride flag on, I don’t know if it actually flew, but you could go to the website and see it on the U.S. Embassy in an Islamic country from left-wing, our left-wing people who lecture us on cultural sensitivity. 

And so it was a misadventure, and he wanted to get credit for taking it out at the expense of the safety of our troops and the interest of our national security. And 13 people died. 

And then in our retaliation, Mark Milley and the hierarchy lied and said it was collateral damage. It was not. There were civilians killed. There were. 

And the low point for me is when that plane took off again, and people were hanging from the wheels and grabbing, trying, you know, falling off on the tarmac. And then a spokesman for the Army came on CNN. I was watching. He said, “And I want to assure you that when they’re in the air and when they land, they’re going to have culturally-appropriate food. We’re going to have Mediterranean Afghanistan gourmet meals for them.” 

And one of the reporters, I don’t know who it was, said, “Have they been vetted? Do you know?” 

“Well, I mean, yes. They’re contractors, assistants, or they were trained.” 

They weren’t. They weren’t vetted at all. In fact, there were American contractors and pro-American Afghans that were left behind. A lot of those pro-American Afghans got murdered because they couldn’t get out. And we took some people who had terrorist ties on the plane. It was just a typical Biden border operation. You know what I mean? Just like the border. Just a joke.  

Jack Fowler: Bum rush. Bum rush America. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah. And it was really humiliating. That was the nadir of that. 

They tried to lie about it. They said everything went well. It was planned, da-da-da. But they couldn’t hide that from the American people. He never regained 50%. 

They tried to say, “Well, Trump was the one that ordered us out in his last few…” 

No, Trump had told the Taliban, “I know where you live. We have satellite imagery of all of you. If you break this deal and try to go after Bagram, etc., we’re going to kill you.” 

And there hadn’t been a problem. 

Maybe some of our listeners will say, and it’s legitimate, “Well, Victor, we have no business over there anyway. You can’t create constitutional government out of a medieval tribal society. And one American life is not worth it. Not even one. Losing one American life is not worth all the billions.” 

And there’s a point. But it could have been scaled back carefully, not the way it happened. And it really hurt our deterrence because everybody should remember who was watching this. Vladimir Putin was. 

And so Vladimir Putin, in his little notebook, said, “Biden, disgraceful, humiliating withdrawal from… Unlike our withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was measured, they couldn’t even do this. Oh, and number two, Biden also said for me to knock off hacking of American institutions. If I were to do it, at least stop hacking nonprofits, not stop it at all, at all costs, just the nonprofits and the humanitarian targets.” 

Oh, and Putin’s little book said, “Oh, he put a hold on offensive weapons that Trump had approved to Ukraine. Oh, here’s another thing I’m looking at,” Putin thought. “He said that he would react accordingly whether it was a minor or major invasion. So we’ll just invade and say it’s minor and he won’t do anything.” 

So he destroyed American deterrence, and it started with Afghanistan. It was no accident that in February, just a few months later, this was in mid-August, right where we are now, 2021, on Feb.24, about six months later, he went into Ukraine. 

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