Biden right to leave Afghanistan
The United States is highly competent at fighting wars when the objective is clear, victory is the only option and a large share of the public supports the engagement. Our country has rarely been good at sustained commitments in murky conflicts where the goal is a vague “political settlement” that is neither victory nor defeat.
We ought to have learned that lesson long ago. Afghanistan has taught it again. It’s why President Joe Biden finally said: Enough.
Biden’s decision to withdraw is a cold, realpolitik judgment, as he underscored in remarks on Sunday. His prism, he said, rested on the questions: “Where are our national interests? Where do they lie?” However brutal the Taliban is, however reactionary and oppressive it might be toward women in particular and dissenters from its purist religious doctrines generally, U.S. interests would not be served by extending our military commitment any longer.
The U.S. engagement in 2001 was prompted by the Taliban’s harboring of al-Qaeda, an immediate, proportionate response to the attacks of 9/11.
With al-Qaeda routed and Osama bin Laden killed, Biden argues, the original mission was accomplished long ago. Now, he says, there is a greater terrorist threat in other countries than there is in Afghanistan, and that’s where our nation’s attention should turn.
For Graham Allison, a foreign policy scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Biden deserves praise for taking a “calculated risk in order to extract the United States from a failing effort in a misguided mission.”
Yes, the ugliness of the aftermath should not distract from the fact that Biden made the right call, the best among the bad choices available. This does not lessen his obligation to respond forcefully to the humanitarian crisis created by the administration’s costly miscalculations about the astonishing speed with which the Taliban would seize control of the country.
On the withdrawal itself, you can distill all the recriminations around Biden’s decision to one essential argument: You either believe a small U.S. force in Afghanistan could have maintained the status quo and held the Taliban at bay, or you don’t.
While thoughtful people think we could have pulled it off, Biden has the better of the argument. The president was operating, after all, in the wake of President Donald Trump’s “peace” deal with the Taliban and his drawdown of American troops from about 13,000 in 2019 to 2,500. Even those who think a small force could have been successful acknowledge that more troops would have been needed. The Afghanistan Study Group report much cited by Biden’s critics concluded that around 4,500 were required.
Meaning that Biden would have had to re-escalate. And if 4,500 had not been enough, or if our forces had come under attack, would the U.S. have had to send yet more troops? The answer is almost certainly yes.
The morale of the Afghan armed forces and the country’s increasingly isolated government had already been fatally weakened by Trump’s deal with the Taliban. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s second national security adviser, called it a surrender agreement.
The signals Trump sent made clear which way the winds were blowing and enabled the Taliban to strike deals of its own all over Afghanistan for quick surrenders by pro-government troops.