Condoleezza Rice speaks out on Afghan withdrawal: ‘The Afghan people didn’t choose the Taliban’

Former national security adviser and secretary of state is not the only Bush administration official to decry the Biden administration’s pullout

As the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan continues its seemingly irretrievable descent into chaos, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice has penned an op-ed lamenting that “It didn’t have to happen this way”.

Writing in the Washington Post, Ms Rice – who served as national security adviser before taking over the State Department for George W Bush’s second term – specifically pushes back against one of the main claims made by Joe Biden and his administration in recent days: that the shockingly fast Taliban takeover is ultimately a failure of Afghan forces, not American power.

“A corrosive and deeply unfair narrative is emerging: to blame the Afghans for how it all ended. The Afghan security forces failed. The Afghan government failed. The Afghan people failed. ‘We gave them every chance to determine their own future,’ President Biden said in his address Monday – as if the Afghans had somehow chosen the Taliban.

Twenty years was not enough to complete a journey from the 7th-century rule of the Taliban and a 30-year civil war to a stable government

Condoleezza Rice, former US Secretary of State under George W Bush

“No,” she writes, “they didn’t choose the Taliban.”

Aside from driving home the scale of the challenges to which the Afghan people have been called to rise, Ms Rice emphasises that the idea the war has dragged on too long misses the point of what it was about.

“Twenty years was not enough to complete a journey from the 7th-century rule of the Taliban and a 30-year civil war to a stable government,” she argues. “Twenty years may also not have been enough to consolidate our gains against terrorism and assure our own safety. We – and they – needed more time.”

This runs directly counter to a central point of Mr Biden’s much-criticised speech on the withdrawal from just days ago. “Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building,” he said. “It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralised democracy. Our only vital national interests in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on American Homeland.”

As someone literally in the room when decisions about the original invasion were made, and as the US’s top diplomat for the second half of the Bush presidency, Ms Rice is well-placed to say what the mission was originally meant to be about, whether or not her reader considers the premise valid or acceptable.

Condoleezza Rice was the US’ top diplomat for the second half of George W Bush’s presidency (DDP/AFP via Getty Images)

In her op-ed, she also speaks strategically. “More time would have served our strategic interests,” she writes.

“We did not want to give ourselves or the Afghans more time. Understood. But we were in such a hurry that we left in the middle of the fighting season. We know that the Taliban retreats in the winter. Might we have waited until then and given the Afghans a little more time to develop a strategy to prevent the chaotic fall of Kabul?

“Now we have to live with the consequences of our haste.”

Ms Rice is one of the less outspoken of the Bush administration’s senior alumni, but this is far from the first time she has weighed in on the Afghan conflict since leaving public office in 2009. During the Trump administration, Ms Rice several times spoke up not just about the need to strike a deal in Afghanistan that would stabilise the country without involving a rushed American exit, however strong the domestic political pressure to bring the war to a close.

In an interview with CBS’s Stephen Colbert in September 2019, she pointed out that the US had been keeping the peace in Korea for some six decades – and made her feelings on negotiating with the Taliban abundantly clear.

“I wouldn’t trust them. Ronald Reagan had a phrase, ‘trust but verify’. So you can negotiate an agreement, but we need to leave forces there long enough to make sure that the Afghan army is able to defend itself.”