The Shaky Pullout from Afghanistan

Joe Biden is on track to do what his two predecessors failed to do: get out of Afghanistan. They failed to achieve this goal due to the worsening security situation and the incapacity of the Afghan forces to take over. After many more years and countless billions spent, it is still unclear that the Afghan National Army (ANA) has the capacity to keep the Taliban from taking over more territory, let alone maintaining control of the capitol. As recently as March, John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, said “the Afghan government’s fears for its survival are only exacerbated by the knowledge of how dependent their country is on foreign military and financial support. If the goal of the reconstruction effort was to build a strong, stable, self-reliant Afghan state that could protect our national security interests as well as its own—it is a mission yet to be accomplished.”

According to Biden, however, that is not the American goal. They did not intend, despite 20 years of evidence, to “nation-build” in Afghanistan. Their goals were 1) “get the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11” 2) “deliver justice to Osama Bin Laden” and 3) “degrade the terrorist threat” to reduce the possibility of Afghanistan becoming a base for terrorist organizations in the future. If these were the goals, they were arguably achieved by May of 2011 when President Barack Obama ordered the successful strike against Bin Laden. 

There is a possibility Obama, or perhaps President Donald Trump would have had to reopen the mission, as Obama did in Iraq in 2014, when the Islamic State (IS) spread across the globe . If that were the case, they would have to remain to this day as the threat from IS Khorasan in the country, let alone the region, remains significant.

Instead, Biden decided to honor the deal struck between Trump’s Administration and the Taliban to completely remove the US presence from the country, albeit on a slightly slower timeline. And what was the reasoning? He determined it is not in the “national interest of the United States of America to continue fighting this war indefinitely.”

He has a point. If the mission has yet to be completed after 20 years, it won’t be completed without a big change within the foreseeable future. Furthermore, he had a front row seat to Obama’s failure to end the war using a troop surge. Is this, therefore, the least worst option?

The truth is we don’t really know. Biden didn’t engage in a long, involved discussion outside of his administration—except to consult with former Presidents Bush and Obama. There wasn’t even much discussion with Congress before he announced he would completely withdraw troops. Even after months, there remained a lack of clarity about the merits of the withdrawal. If the pull-out from Bagram Air Base is any indication, there is nothing orderly, well-thought through, or well-executed about the withdrawal. After 20 years, countless public embarrassments due to poor policy planning, no way to achieve victory, and a great risk to security from instability in that country, shouldn’t the administration take more time to have a serious and perhaps a public discussion about how to bring this war to a close? Shouldn’t members of Congress push the administration to engage in this deliberation? Shouldn’t the public?

The fact is, the Taliban is salivating over this result and using it to demonstrate that they have achieved their mission: remove the imperial power from their state and reassert their control.

But Biden is resolute. He claims he “will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation of achieving a different outcome.”

As I demonstrate in a recent article discussing 10 criteria for successful deliberations about military policy, an effective way to avoid implementing haphazard policy is to engage in thoughtful discussions in order to effectively achieve well-articulated goals. Instead, what we see from this administration is what we’ve seen throughout the War on Terror: policy that looks reactionary and poorly developed because it is.