Four months after the Sept. 11 attacks, with the Taliban on the run from invading U.S. forces, then-Sen. Joe Biden was the first U.S. elected official to arrive in Kabul. Biden was head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and his first meeting, even before seeing President Hamid Karzai, was with Afghanistan's education minister.
Biden asked how the United States could help, certain that the reply would include funding requests to rebuild war-damaged schools and money for equipment, desks, even pencils. The minister surprised Biden by saying he needed just three things: security, security, security. Without it, he argued, parents wouldn't allow their children to walk the streets to go to school, nor would older students and teachers feel safe enough to drive the roads to attend college.
That this message came from an unlikely source made it all the more powerful. The security imperative guided Biden's thinking as well as that of the many critics of the Bush administration who insisted the United States had "taken our eye off the ball" by focusing on Iraq, giving al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden a chance to escape and providing the Taliban the respite it needed to reconstitute power. Unless security was enhanced, they argued, the vacuum created eventually would lead to a terrorist haven that would again threaten U.S. national security.
Year after year, Biden did what he could to buck up Karzai, to help extend his authority throughout Afghanistan so that Karzai would be more than the "president of Kabul." Biden openly fought with Bush officials who deemed Karzai's limited power sound policy and pushed back against a decentralized system in which regional and tribal leaders with questionable allegiances and corrupt practices exerted power over large swaths of territory.
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