There's much in Mr. Biden's abrupt abandonment of the Afghans for which Americans might be deeply ashamed, but for novelist and veteran Brad Taylor writing at National Review the worst was June 16th. For him this was the day Afghanistan died.
Taylor
writes:
The Afghanistan Commandos are the only force in the Afghanistan National Army (ANA) that actually fight and win. They have done so since we began building them, first with the CIA, then with our own Special Forces. They were known as the only force that had no tribal affiliation and were the only force in the country that would fight for the state of Afghanistan regardless of the human terrain.
And they were really good. At one point, toward the end, they were conducting upwards of 90 percent of all combat actions inside the country — strained to the breaking point but succeeding with the support of the United States.
And then we pulled the support.
There was a nationwide plan for Commando use, which, put simply, was that they would insert and clear out Taliban influence, and then would be replaced with regular ANA components to keep the area secure and out of Taliban control. To this, they had been very successful. On that fateful day in June, everything changed.
The Commandos assaulted a village called Dawlat Abad and routed the Taliban. They called in the ANA to take over, and the ANA refused to enter, afraid of the Taliban.
The Taliban regrouped and surrounded the village, pounding it with mortar fire and conducting a siege, until the small contingent of Commandos had no recourse but to surrender. Calls for air support went unheeded, because America had pulled the maintenance capability of the very aircraft that would have responded. There was no help coming.
Twenty-two Commandos surrendered to the Taliban. All 22 were summarily executed — on video. One of the men killed was a soldier named Sohrab Azimi. He was the son of an ANA general, trained in the United States, and engaged to be married to a United States citizen. He could have done anything with his life, but he chose to lead the Commandos.
He was the best and brightest of Afghanistan, and he was killed on the street with a bullet to the back of his head because his pleas for air support went unheeded.
The news of June 16 didn’t even create a blip in the United States. Nobody cared, but make no mistake, the average soldier or civilian in the Afghanistan hierarchy did.
Sohrab Azimi was a national hero in Afghanistan. He was like a cross between Captain America and Saladin. I read the story and felt horrible at the loss. When I thought about it pragmatically, the only thought that entered my mind was, “This is the end.”
And that was two months before the fall of Kabul. Perception in insurgency has a sway all its own. It becomes reality, and when the action happened, I saw the reality.
There's much more worth reading in Taylor's column, but I'll just add this excerpt,
The signal sent by our lack of support was precisely the perception that the Taliban wanted: You are all going to die. And the people in positions of authority both low and high took that to heart. Afghanistan was done on that date.
Maybe pulling out of Afghanistan was the proper thing to do, though I'm not of that opinion, but in any case, the way the Biden administration did it, precipitously withdrawing air support from Afghans who were fighting bravely while trusting us for air cover, will shame America for as long as our nation lasts.
