E.J. Dionne Jr.
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 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 reiterated Friday, the original mission was accomplished long ago. Now, he said, 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, the veteran foreign policy scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Biden deserves praise, not scorn, 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.
The United States must be aggressive in pulling out not only Americans but also Afghans who risked their lives to support our troops, without imposing an artificial deadline. We can do better than this. And we must make things right with restive NATO allies.
On the withdrawal itself, you can distill all the recriminations around Biden’s decision to one essential argument: You either believe that 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 Donald Trump’s “peace” deal with the Taliban and his drawdown of American troops from about 13,000 in 2019 to 2,500, a number that drifted upward to perhaps 3,500. Even those who think a small force could have been successful acknowledge that more troops would have been needed. The bipartisan Afghanistan Study Group report much cited by Biden’s critics concluded that “around 4,500” were required.
Meaning that Biden would have had to reescalate. And if 4,500 had not been enough, or if our forces had come under attack, would the United States 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 in February 2020 and his lauding the group’s leaders — “they’re very tough, they’re very smart, they’re very sharp.” H.R. McMaster, Trump’s second national security adviser, called it a “surrender agreement with the Taliban.”
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.
The United States needs to learn from this mess, not just from the past two years but from across the entire two decades of our commitment.
The launching of the Iraq War 17 months after the intervention against the Taliban turned the Afghanistan war into a sideshow. Wars should never be sideshows. And as Post writer Craig Whitlock’s exceptional reporting shows, American officials, including the military, spun deceptively rosy accounts of progress that covered up profound problems that reached a climax this month.
In going through what I had written over the years about Afghanistan, I found this from a 2011 column: “The United States has done what it could to improve the situation on the ground in Afghanistan. We have to decide whether this commitment will end or whether there will be an endless series of ‘fighting seasons’ in which we need to give it one more try.”
Ten fighting seasons later, Biden decided that giving it one more try was futile. He was right to end the cycle of disappointment and frustration.
Now he must take responsibility for correcting errors of execution. Declaring he was doing so was the point of his detailed comments about the evacuation effort on Sunday. “We’re working hard and as fast as we can, to get people out,” Biden said.
He also carries the burden of showing in the coming months through his policy choices that his decision will — as he insists — make our country stronger, not weaker, and the world safer. It will not be easy. It would not have been easier five, 10 or 20 years from now.
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