Empires and great powers pull out of outposts when the cost of maintaining them grows too high. The Romans withdrew from Dacia (modern Romania) in AD 275 and from Britannia (Britain) in 410. The British left India in 1947 and gave up the Palestine Mandate the next year. The French left Algeria in 1962. The United States withdrew its troops from South Vietnam in 1973; two years later, Saigon fell, and the Americans were forced into an emergency evacuation of the last of their personnel. An even more hurried pullout awaited the Americans in Afghanistan in August 2021. So ended 20 years of America’s war in that country. In the grand scheme of history, the mere fact of the USA withdrawing from a failed enterprise abroad is not unusual. It is the manner of the American departure from Afghanistan that spurs controversy.
Journalists, eyewitnesses, and U.S. government officials and investigators have all labeled the withdrawal as botched and chaotic. As Americans were in the process of pulling out the last of their troops, the Afghan government collapsed and the Taliban took the capital city, Kabul, on August 15, 2021—far sooner than the U.S. had predicted. Originally the U.S. had planned to leave 2,500 American troops plus several thousand NATO forces on the ground. But as the situation deteriorated, they decided on a full withdrawal by August 31, 2021. Thousands of Afghan allies of the United States were left stranded. Before the last American troops left on August 30, a suicide bombing attack outside Kabul airport killed 13 American soldiers and 170 Afghans trying to flee the country. How did things go so wrong?
Both the Trump and Biden administrations had agreed on the wisdom of withdrawal. The Trump administration reached an agreement with the Taliban and began implementing it before leaving office in January 2021; the Biden administration completed it. Both have come under criticism. President Donald Trump has been blamed for an agreement that hurt the morale of the Afghan government and security forces. Critics blame President Joe Biden for disregarding the agreement’s preconditions for withdrawal; for ordering a civilian withdrawal that was too slow and too late; for failing to have an adequate crisis-management taskforce in the U.S. State Department; for leaving over $7 billion of military equipment in the Taliban’s hands; for giving up Bagram Air Base; and for abandoning allies and costing the lives of American troops and Afghan civilians.
Historically, some withdrawals have gone better, but probably not many. Britain’s handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, after about 150 years of colonial rule, was relatively painless. The change was put into effect peacefully through a signed agreement sealed in 1985. China agreed that Hong Kong would enjoy its liberal capitalist system for 50 years, but China has reneged by cracking down brutally on Hong Kong’s freedoms.
Few withdrawals have been more painful for the departing power than France’s departure from Algeria. France invaded Algeria in 1830 and made it a colony before declaring it in 1848 to be a départment, that is, a part of France. Many Frenchmen emigrated to Algeria and settled there. Most Algerians, however, wanted to be free. A long and bloody war for independence (1954–1962) cost more than a million lives, two million internal refugees in Algeria, a million French colonists departing for Europe, and a political upheaval in France that led to massive constitutional change.
Few withdrawals have left as much carnage in their wake as Britain’s departure from India in 1947 or Palestine in 1948. Intercommunal violence convinced Britain to partition India into two states, a mostly Hindu India and a mostly Muslim Pakistan. Ten million refugees moved between the two states following British withdrawal. Amidst horrific violence, approximately one million people were killed. In Palestine, a civil war between Arabs and Jews preceded the British withdrawal. The proclamation of the state of Israel followed immediately afterward, along with invasion by a coalition of Arab states. Estimates of the dead in the war that ensued range between ca.10,000 and ca. 20,000 people. Approximately 700,000 Arab refugees fled or were expelled from Israel, while a similar number of Jewish refugees fled or were expelled from Islamic countries in the following years.
In some ways the United States paid a small price for its departure from Afghanistan, but the repercussions have arguably been massive. In February 2022, six months after the fall of Kabul, Russia under Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Surely America’s show of weakness in its chaotic pullout from Afghanistan played a role in his decision to engage in brazen aggression.
Afghanistan has not done well since the American withdrawal. Most of the population requires humanitarian assistance in the face of poverty, food insecurity, and a near-collapse of the health system. Women and girls have been excluded from public life. The consequences have rippled outward in a dangerous manner. Today, the UN calls the Islamic State in Afghanistan’s Khorasan Province (ISIS-K) the greatest terror threat to Europe. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres wrote, “I call on all member states to unite to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a hotbed of terrorist activities that affect other countries.”
