What America’s Middle Eastern allies can learn from the collapse of Afghanistan

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The comparisons being made between the fall of Kabul to Taliban fighters and the fall of Saigon, with its iconic photographs of U.S. helicopters evacuating American personnel from city rooftops, are unfair to the South Vietnamese. They persevered for over two years after the U.S. military departed in early 1973, until Saigon fell in April 1975. The Afghan National Army has melted away before U.S. troops even departed.

This is a personal humiliation for President Joe Biden, who said only last month that “the Taliban is not the North Vietnamese army. They’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstances where you see people being lifted off the roof of the embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.”

Few U.S. presidents assumed office with foreign policy experience comparable to that of Biden – accumulated over his decades in the relevant Senate committees (he was in his first term as senator when Saigon fell) and his eight years as Barack Obama‘s vice president. Unlike his immediate predecessor Donald Trump, whom Biden has been trying to blame in recent days for the failed deal with the Taliban, Biden reads his daily intelligence briefing papers.

Biden’s blithe assurances will have been based on the assessments of the U.S. intelligence community. They will continue to haunt him personally, just as Obama was haunted by his “red line” promise to retaliate if the Assad regime used chemical weapons against Syrian civilians and his original assertion that ISIS was merely “a J.V. team.”

Whether or not this will harm the Biden administration’s domestic political standing or international credibility remains to be seen. Any potential domestic damage will probably be short-lived. America’s “longest war” is far from popular at home. Leaving Afghanistan, even in these humiliating circumstances, is what the overwhelming majority of Americans wanted Biden to do.

Smoke rising near the U.S. Embassy in Kabul on Sunday.Rahmat Gul/AP

What this means for America’s traditional allies is another matter.

For many of those allies, his election last year was reason for a massive sigh of relief. Trump’s fondness for dictators – including many of America’s rivals, from Vladimir Putin to Kim Jong Un – alongside his unconcealed contempt for NATO, did more than any rushed evacuation to erode the U.S.’ standing.

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Biden has restored that trust. Even those American allies whom Trump favored – chiefly Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – have been relieved by Biden’s policies so far. He hasn’t pressured Israel to make any major concessions to the Palestinians. Nor has he rushed to go back to the Iranian nuclear agreement or acted on his pre-election threats to make the Saudis pay for their human rights record.

But Biden is not the problem. The Kabul debacle is on his watch, but the failure can be shared by all four administrations since the United States first launched its Afghan campaign in the wake of 9/11, some 20 years ago.

The real effect on America’s allies, especially Israel and the pro-Western Arab regimes, is that America, now and for the foreseeable future, has a heightened awareness of its limitations.

That’s not entirely new. It was already clear from the later years of George W. Bush’s presidency that once the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns began to bog down, there was no longer much appetite for foreign adventures. Bush stood aside in 2008 as Russia invaded Georgia, a pro-Western nation. Obama publicly abandoned America’s oldest ally in the Middle East, Hosni Mubarak; reneged on his promises to protect Syrians from chemical weapons; and did nothing to help Ukraine when Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014.

Afghans waiting in line to secure visas at the Iranian Embassy in Afghanistan earlier today.Rahmat Gul/AP

Obama at least paid lip service. Trump quite obviously couldn’t care less. For all the talk of his striking Iran, with the exception of the assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, he only ever seriously considered it once he had lost the election and his hold over the Pentagon.

Both Obama and Trump were prepared in some cases to use air power, though Obama was dragged by the Europeans to help the Libyan rebels, while it took the executions of Western prisoners to get him to sign off on airstrikes against ISIS. It was clear that the era of “boots on the ground” was long over.

The realization that the Americans are no longer prepared to squander the lives of their own soldiers is not the only lasting effect of its military failures of the past two decades. It goes deeper than that. As Biden said on Saturday, a U.S. military presence “would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country.”

Whether you call it nation-building or regime-change, America has learned, at least for now, that it doesn’t work unless there’s a nation that wants to change its regime.

America hasn’t abandoned its allies. It would be grossly unfair to characterize a 20-year investment of some 2,400 U.S. lives and nearly a trillion dollars in that way. It simply can’t help them if they are incapable of helping themselves.

A Lebanese protester demonstrating in Beirut earlier this month.AZIZ TAHER/REUTERS

The United States can’t fix a failed state. For Israel, which is surrounded by two failed states in Lebanon and Syria, and two others that could rapidly be on the brink of failure in Egypt and Jordan, this is a sobering conclusion.

Ironically, in the last two decades of U.S. campaigns in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the only foreign military intervention that actually achieved its objectives was that of Russia in Syria. Saving and propping up a dictator by bombing hospitals and bakeries in rebel-held areas, as the Russian Air Force did on behalf of the Assad regime, is much easier than establishing democracy and equality for women in a deeply tribal and religious society.

That’s especially true when there is a deeply entrenched enemy like the Taliban, which can lose control of territory for nearly 20 years but never go away, waiting patiently until the Americans leave.

The only way, perhaps, to destroy the Taliban would have been to wipe out the villages and communities that sheltered it, and that isn’t the way America fights its wars in the 21st century. That’s a good thing. America, for all its faults, isn’t Russia. But its limitations mean that its allies sometimes have to fend for themselves.

The most immediate conclusion for Israel is that if Lebanon is engulfed by chaos, which could be imminent, it will not be able to rely on the United States or anyone else to help prevent Hezbollah taking control of the country. It will take years, if not decades, for the memory of Kabul to fade.