In July, President Joe Biden is expected to visit Saudi Arabia in an attempt to reduce gas prices and inflation. Biden, while on the campaign trail, had pledged to make the country a “pariah” for its record of human rights abuses. He began his presidency by releasing an intel report that directly implicated Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
The fact that all of that now seems to be out the window may seem surprising to some, including Democrats in the House and Senate, but the United State’s willingness to shove aside ethical concerns for the sake of political expediency is a long-established pattern. What’s noteworthy here, however, is that the foreign policy establishment appears to have learned nothing in the two decades since the 9/11 attacks.
The foreign policy establishment appears to have learned nothing in the two decades since the 9/11 attacks.
In mid-May, two reports—one issued by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) and the other by the U.S. Department of Defense—examined why the Afghan army collapsed so suddenly in August 2021 and how, since the Taliban’s return to power, the country has once again become a safe haven for terrorists.
At first glance, both reports appear to offer an objective and detailed account of a conflict that was presented to the public in obfuscating terms. Yet, like so many official reports before them, they miss the bigger picture.
The SIGAR report claims that former President Donald Trump’s agreement with the Taliban—and the Biden Administration’s decision to honor it—made the Afghans feel that they had been abandoned and broke their will to keep fighting after more than forty years of continuous devastation. But nowhere in the report is there an explanation as to why there was still a war raging in Afghanistan after two decades of intense military effort by the world’s preeminent superpower against ill-equipped fundamentalist militants.
The report highlights that the United States’ goal was to build an Afghan army that was “independent, self-sustaining, and able to defend against internal and external threats,” but never identifies what these external threats are. It speaks of “malign influence” on Afghans and “the Taliban’s own foreign dependencies,” yet never names them. Well, who are they?
Such omissions have been standard ever since the existential shock of 9/11 locked Americans into a fixation with the attack’s direct al-Qaeda perpetrators and their Taliban hosts, while ignoring the powerful state-level actors who created the milieu in which they thrived, and their motivations for doing so. This led to a refusal to examine the extended backstory of Islamic extremism, which became a world force because political forces in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan used it to counter the previously dominant nationalist and modernizing trends in many Muslim countries.
The harsh fact that these twin sources of radicalization among Sunni Muslims have been heavily supported by the United States and other liberal Western nations since the early days of the Cold War has rarely entered the debate. And there is overwhelming evidence, for example, that Pakistan continued supporting the Taliban even as it received billions of dollars in American military assistance over the course of the war.
The Department of Defense report, though similarly devoid of context, is straightforward about the consequences of the United State’s self-inflicted defeat. There is once again a “permissive environment” for terrorists to thrive in a once again Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. And while its rulers are constraining their enduring al Qaeda allies at the moment to stave off Western pressure, they “will likely loosen these restrictions over the next twelve to twenty-four months,” according to the report.
The direct perpetrators of 9/11 were never the only terrorist group with global ambitions of finding a safe haven under the support of Western allies, and others, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba which carried out the Mumbai attacks in 2008, have now returned to their old home in Pakistan with a renewed sense of triumph and exhilaration.
In his widely read article “The Obama Doctrine,” which appeared in The Atlantic in 2016, Jeffrey Goldberg reported that President Barack Obama “privately questions why Pakistan, which he believes is a disastrously dysfunctional country, should be considered an ally of the U.S. at all,” and that “he has also questioned, often harshly, the role that America’s Sunni Arab allies play in fomenting anti-American terrorism. He is clearly irritated that foreign-policy orthodoxy compels him to treat Saudi Arabia as an ally.”
The United States, at its best, is a land where people look inward, take responsibility for their faults, and resolve to do better.
If this was true of Obama, and Washington as a whole over the course of the Afghan war, then they failed in their duty to the nation. The United States, at its best, is a land where people look inward, take responsibility for their faults, and resolve to do better. To have failed to do this is a tremendous betrayal of the ideals of this country.
And this lack of introspection continues today, as evidenced by Biden’s upcoming trip to Saudi Arabia, whose centuries-old official Wahhabi creed is the ideological font of modern Islamic extremism. That the United States and other liberal Western countries have enabled the Saudis’ diffusion of their fanaticism for the better part of a century in order to have access to the oil that they control is the original sin that should have been recognized and atoned for after 9/11.
Biden’s trip is yet another act in a tragedy that will not be resolved until we come to recognize that we are its protagonist.