Last week, the Biden administration released an unsigned twelve-page “document on the US Withdrawal from Afghanistan,” which tried to put a favorable face on the chaotic 2021 withdrawal. The report portrays President Biden as a wise leader who “undertook a deliberate, intensive, rigorous, and inclusive decision-making process,” only to fall prey to bad intelligence and circumstances beyond his control. At no point did it mention numerous reports, both before and after the fiasco, that top advisers cautioned the president against total withdrawal from Afghanistan. Instead, the bluster of the report harks back to his remarks of August 31, 2021, in which he celebrated the “extraordinary success” of pulling out of Afghanistan.
Those remarks briefly discussed the Doha agreement that “the previous administration”—President Trump was not mentioned by name—made with the Taliban (“which is not recognized by the United States as a state”). The Doha agreement called for the United States to cut its troop levels down to 8,600 within 135 days, close five bases, and release 5,000 prisoners, all with the goal of completing its exit by March 2021. But the agreement was contingent on the Taliban and the Afghan government, led by President Ashraf Ghani, negotiating the transition’s details.
Bad idea. There was no reason for Trump to have committed the United States to a quick withdrawal from Afghanistan when, in light of widely known history, he had no reason to think the Taliban would keep its side of the bargain. The Doha arrangement thus created political pressure in the United States for a withdrawal even though it was likely to create the very kind of instability that American and allied presence in Afghanistan had, to date, avoided.
The Doha deadlines became an obsession in the most recent Biden report, which placed all blame for the fiasco on the Trump administration—notwithstanding that Trump had been out of office for eight months before the meltdown. The Biden administration’s review blamed Trump for a deal with the Taliban that “severely constrained” the United States’ options, even though the Biden administration could have abandoned the agreement, given the lack of any serious negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government. Thus, the only serious constraint was self-imposed—by a Biden administration too eager to exit Afghanistan before September 11, 2021, so it could claim credit for ending American’s longest war twenty years after it began.
Exaggerated Risks
Biden rejected any possibility of adding American and allied forces in Afghanistan because of the supposed risks it would pose to our troops. Biden’s National Security Council spokesman, John Kirby, said the president’s hand was forced because “he inherited a depleted operation in Afghanistan from Trump that crippled the US response.” Neither Kirby nor anyone else in the Biden administration attempted to quantify those risks. Indeed, the overall situation in Afghanistan was relatively stable up to the summer of 2021. The graph below tells a story of growing stability after initial doubts and failure.
The US and NATO casualty levels had dropped nearly to zero, which reduced the cost of staying far below the huge costs implied by the Biden administration. More precisely, under Trump the number of troops in Afghanistan had dropped to 2,500 by the time he left office, from about 8,600 when Doha was signed—far below the 120,000 troops deployed during President Obama’s first term. The new report claims the United States would have needed “to send more troops into harm’s way” to stabilize the situation. How many more? This report does not specify, but certainly not anything close to the levels of a decade earlier. Still, Biden maintained the view articulated in the August 2021 statement:
So, we were left with a simple decision: either follow through on the commitment made by the last administration and leave Afghanistan, or say we weren’t leaving and commit another tens of thousands more troops going back to war.
But that dichotomy was always false, given the zero-casualty rate in the preceding months. The report notes that the Taliban controlled a fair bit of territory, but it does not give any reason to think that the group could take over the main population centers under the status quo. The 2,500 troops, as well as 7,000 allied troops and civilian resources, had used their collective intelligence and air support to allow the Afghan army to do the work in the field with far greater efficiency than it could have done on its own. It may have made sense to double or even triple the size of the American contingent to reinforce the situation on the ground, but it is utterly preposterous to think that tens of thousands of troops would have had to be committed to battle as they were in 2007–13.
To dispute that claim, the new report argues that the rapid breakdown of the Afghan military after American and NATO support was cut off proves that when Biden made his decision to withdraw, no additional aid could have averted the decline. But Biden’s team has the causal chain backwards: it was the removal of the current level of support in midsummer that compromised and demoralized Afghan forces, and the removal explains the precipitous collapse of the Afghan position. Taliban troops were already mobilized in the field in preparation for the ill-planned announced transition. At the very least, the transition could have been arranged to avoid giving the Taliban a tactical advantage; postponing the move until winter would had driven the Taliban back into their caves. Biden’s pursuit of a symbolic victory of a September 11 withdrawal deadline thus had devastating real world consequences.
Left Behind
The basic problem was that Biden’s worldview focused exclusively on the American and NATO interventions—namely, the wholly legitimate concern that Afghanistan not be used as base for terrorist activities. That point was front and center in the Doha agreement, which contained “[g]uarantees and enforcement mechanisms that will prevent the use of the soil of Afghanistan by any group or individual against the security of the United States and its allies.” The want of any specific enforcement mechanism, however, doomed this commitment from the beginning. Indeed, even if Doha had been scrupulously observed on the day of the US and NATO withdrawal, nothing would have prevented the Taliban from breaking its word one day later, knowing full well that the United States and its NATO allies would never return in force. This narrow definition of the mission, for which the Trump administration deserves much of the initial blame, spelled the long-term failure of the deal. Even so, the Biden administration could have pulled out shortly after taking office.
Biden’s stated objective attached zero weight to the plight of the Afghan people under Taliban rule. As Tim Kane pointed out at the time, the transformation of Afghan life was profound and enduring so long as minimal American and allied presence remained. The country saw vast increases in the number of children, especially girls, receiving an education, the basis of a happier and more productive society. Afghans have now been thrown to the mercy of the Taliban, which has taken step after step to deny women basic liberties pertaining to educational and occupational freedom, and causing a massive economic contraction of 20.7 percent in 2021. And the Biden administration response? Ignore entirely the modest costs of staying against the high costs of leaving. It was a purely empty gesture, committing to stand up for the rights of women and girls and to isolate the Taliban for its appalling human rights record without any mechanism or real will to do so.
But perhaps there is some saving grace in Biden’s ploy. The report claimed that leaving Afghanistan “freed up” American personnel and assets to put us on “stronger footing” to meet other existential threats around the world, including Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea. But the claim is hollow. The 2,500 service members freed from obligations in the Middle East are not remotely enough to stem advances elsewhere, let alone offset the reductions in US military personnel and the inadequacy of military budgets. And what of the massive loss of military equipment at Bagram Airfield, from which the United States withdrew in July 2021 without first informing the local Afghan commanders?
Vladimir Putin surely viewed the United States as a loser before he invaded Ukraine, and Xi Jinping will hardly view the United States as a power in the Taiwan theater. The only way to regain credibility is for the Biden administration to pivot away from a strategy based only on rhetoric and symbolism.
