The U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 was the lowest point of Joe Biden’s presidency. The optics, including chaotic scenes at the barricaded Kabul International Airport and desperate Afghans clinging to U.S. transport planes, were grim. The entire withdrawal process was aired live on cable news networks, with former U.S. generals opining about how the U.S. was “abandoning” Afghanistan and its people to a brutal fate under the Taliban.
This grueling experience continues to hang over the Biden administration like a headache that never goes away. But on April 6, the White House sought to issue an antidote in the form of an internal report outlining why the withdrawal proceeded the way it did, who was at fault for the lackluster implementation and what lessons the administration learned in the process. The 12-page summary released to the public was an attempt at closure. Unfortunately, it brought even more problems for the White House.
The document reads less like an impartial record than a defense brief. Seemingly, whatever went wrong during the withdrawal was the prior administration’s fault — and whatever went right, including the fact that more than 120,000 people were airlifted out of Afghanistan, was the result of Biden’s prudent interagency planning.
The Biden White House, the report said, was given a bad hand when it entered office, with a U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan at its lowest point since 2001, Taliban control of Afghan territory at its highest and a State Department special visa program that was in shambles after years of neglect.
“It was a general sense of degradation and neglect there that the president inherited,” U.S. national security spokesman John Kirby told the White House press corps upon the summary’s release. President Donald Trump’s decision to sign the Doha accord with the Taliban in February 2020 only accelerated that sense of degradation, Kirby said. The agreement mandated a U.S. troop departure at a specific date.
Congressional Republicans unsurprisingly were infuriated by the White House’s explanation. “John Kirby’s comments during today’s White House press briefing were disgraceful and insulting,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul said in a news release. U.S. Rep. James Comer, Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, promised to scold the administration’s response during an April 19 hearing with the Defense Department’s inspector general.
Yet amid the back-and-forth about blame is a crucial fact that no amount of shape-shifting can obscure: Leaving Afghanistan was still the right decision. That the implementation of the withdrawal left much to be desired doesn’t mean the decision to pack up after two long decades wasn’t the correct one.
While Biden supported the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, he wasn’t a vocal proponent of staying the course or escalating U.S. involvement there. During his time as vice president, Biden was one of the most vocal skeptics of the surge strategy articulated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Gen. David Petraeus, among others. He never believed U.S. troops should be responsible for transforming a nation rife with corruption and warlords with their own personal armies and whose leaders were often participants in the drug trade.
In one memorable exchange, as reported by journalist George Packer, Biden as vice president excoriated the U.S. special representative to Afghanistan at the time, Richard Holbrooke, for arguing that the U.S. couldn’t leave the country even if the war was lost. “I am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights!” Biden said at the time. “It just won’t work; that’s not what they’re there for.”
Biden was right. The original mission for the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan was clear-cut and achievable: Bring Osama bin Laden to justice, decimate his al-Qaida terrorist network and penalize the Taliban for being reckless enough to host a group that killed nearly 3,000 people on American soil.
Most of those objectives were accomplished fairly early on; by early 2002, the Taliban were begging for a peace agreement with the new Afghan government, and al-Qaida’s physical infrastructure was destroyed. (In 2011, U.S. special operators hunted down and killed bin Laden in Pakistan.)
Yet the U.S. quickly transitioned its involvement in Afghanistan from a terrorist-hunting enterprise to a full-fledged nation-building fallacy, building new institutions from scratch, as well as an army, and developing an entirely different political system. The Taliban were treated as outcasts rather than a real constituency best managed by bringing them into the new system.
The U.S. spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to do all of this while fighting a Taliban insurgency that had the luxury of a safe haven across the border in Pakistan. The American public checked out of the war long before Trump even authorized negotiations with the Taliban; one Pew Research Center survey in 2019 found that 58% of veterans believed the war wasn’t worth fighting.
In essence, Biden had three options in Afghanistan: keep the status quo, escalate U.S. involvement or withdraw. The first option would have eventually led to the second because the Taliban were clear that attacks would resume if U.S. troops stayed past the September deadline.
The U.S. tried the second option again and again throughout its 20-year misadventure, most notably during President Barack Obama’s 2010-11 troop surge, and the result was at best a temporary calm that had to be sustained with an indefinite garrison.
Withdrawal, however, would have cut the cord on a failed enterprise and saved thousands of U.S. troops from a sunk-cost fallacy that dominated U.S. policy toward Afghanistan for so long.
The way the U.S. carried out its withdrawal left much to be desired. But don’t be mistaken: Withdrawal was the right policy.
