One Year Later, We Still Should Have Left Afghanistan

Leaving made sense because the big battles over the world’s future are elsewhere

Joe Biden made the right decision to leave Afghanistan in 2021. That decision has withstood the test of one year’s time. I think that ultimately, it will withstand the scrutiny of history.

There is a lot to be said about Afghanistan, but for the purposes of Perilous Times, this is the key point:

Our problems in Afghanistan were caused by George Bush’s belief that the war was about promoting democracy and liberal values and Joe Biden had to get out of Afghanistan because it had become a drain on our effort to defend democracy and liberal values.

How ironic.

To start off, I do not believe that military intervention in Afghanistan was unjustified or immoral. It was a just war. Al Qaeda had used its safe-haven in Afghanistan to launch a vicious attack on innocent American civilians. The Taliban was given a chance to turn over the perpetrators of this attack but refused. The United States had a right under the U.N. Charter to defend itself against future attacks by using military force against both al Qaeda and the Taliban government that was harboring the group.

George W. Bush’s mistake was to see U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan not as a narrowly targeted mission to mitigate the terrorist threat, but instead as part of Bush’s far broader project to advance American hegemony in the post-Cold War era by spreading democracy and liberal values across the globe. He articulated this world-view during his campaign for the presidency in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Library. Bush argued that American foreign policy must “make a place for the human spirit” and claimed that “the most powerful force in the world is not a weapon or a nation but a truth: that we are spiritual beings, and that freedom is the soul's right to breathe.” (internal quotations omitted). “Lovers of freedom,” Bush predicted, “would be free.”

After the 9/11 attacks, Bush applied his quasi-religious belief in the universality of liberal values to help justify the “global war on terror” that he was launching. Totally misdiagnosing the source of al Qaeda’s support, Bush believed that people were attracted to violent Islamist extremism because they had been deprived of personal freedom and democracy. In Bush’s eyes, the fight in Afghanistan, therefore, had to accomplish more than just decimating al Qaeda. Bush’s project was to bring liberalism to a Muslim country where extremism had thrived in order to prove that freedom and democracy were the antidote to terrorism. That is how we got nation-building in Afghanistan.

I discuss elsewhere why as a matter of history, religion, ideology, and economics, this mission was “doomed from the start.” In the poorest, most religiously rigid, most tribal, and possibly most corrupt place in the world, America’s modern nation-building project never had a chance. Despite suffering a quick initial defeat, the Taliban was able to cast itself in the popular role as the opponent of foreign invasion and defender of Islam as the years of American intervention dragged on. Add to this the Americans’ inability to uproot corruption and build government institutions the Afghan people could trust, and the Taliban’s victory was preordained. For the Taliban, it was only a matter of waiting until America lost patience and interest, which we did.

A lot transpired in the succeeding years, but in a nutshell, here is the situation Joe Biden faced upon taking office in 2021:

By negotiating a treaty with the Taliban without any participation by the Afghan government, Donald Trump had cut the legs out from under the Afghan government and security forces we had spent 19+ years building. This agreement scheduled the exact date of complete U.S. troop withdrawal (April 30, 2021), but provided absolutely no obligation on the Taliban to end the civil war. The Taliban won the war the day the agreement was inked on February 29, 2020.

When Biden entered the White House 11 months later, the handwriting was on the wall. Trump had reduced the American troop presence to 2500, the lowest level since the war began. The Taliban was taking over more and more territory in the provinces and Afghan soldiers were hedging their bets by laying down their arms to protect themselves and their families once the inevitable Taliban takeover occurred. By the beginning of 2021, the number of those leaving the Army had outstripped the number of new hires by 10:1. 

Biden’s past record was clear. As vice-president, he opposed Obama’s counter-insurgency troop surge in 2009 and he campaigned in favor of withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2019-20. Many thought that he would reverse himself once he sat behind the Resolute Desk. But Biden must have known that to save the Afghan government, not only would he have to break the treaty and send even more troops to Afghanistan, but those U.S. troops would have to do much more of the fighting themselves because the Afghan Army had been so devastated. And for what? Decades more of midwifing an incompetent and corrupt Afghan government that had earned the antipathy of most Afghans? How could this be in America’s best interest? And how could Biden possibly sell this change in policy to an American public that had turned against continued American support for this war on a bipartisan basis?

Biden made the brave decision to pull the plug.

It was brave, because no matter what the military and intelligence communities were saying, Biden most certainly knew the Taliban would take over on his watch and that this spectacle would damage his and our country’s prestige. Neither of Biden’s predecessor in office were willing to take this hit. Obama wanted to get America out of the war, but did not want Kabul to fall while he was president, so we continued a war that we could not win. Trump wanted to get out too, but delayed the day of reckoning until after his attempt at re-election. Biden knew full well that there was no good way to lose this war, but decided to leave anyway.

It was the right thing to do. 

It was right because even if the misguided concept that we needed to bring liberalism to Afghanistan to undercut violent Islamist extremism had some currency in 2001, it no longer held any water in 2021.

The battle for liberal democracy was elsewhere. By 2021, China had already been implementing for years its grand strategy to topple the U.S. led liberal world order. Russia was overtly trying to recover the glories of its imperial past — to achieve this it too was undercutting America and its allies at every turn.

Sure, Afghanistan was not costing a great deal in blood and treasure. But it was a lingering distraction and drain on the goodwill of the American people who had invested a great deal in this war, but had concluded that it was time to cut bait.

To continue the war in the face of widespread public opposition would have further stoked the animosity toward American internationalism and engagement that helped fuel Trump’s rise to power. But to face off against China and Russia, Biden knew he would need to dampen the forces of isolationism that had grown in the shadows of American failures in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Continuing the inconclusive slog in Afghanistan could not possibly get Americans ready to face the challenges that were to come.

And come they did.

Biden did not know it at the time, but his decision in March, 2021 to leave Afghanistan gave him the political space he would need, less than a year later, to call for American sacrifice yet again to help save Ukraine in February, 2022. The future of liberal democracy might also soon be challenged in the South China Sea, or in the Persian Gulf, or in Taiwan or North Korea, or in Estonia or Moldova or yet again in Kyiv. As the past year has shown, these vital American interests are simply not at stake in Afghanistan.

No one can look back on what happened one year ago in Kabul with anything but sorrow and disappointment. And I will write here again soon about the security situation and the human rights issues, especially those relating to Afghan women and girls.

But one year ago was it time to leave Afghanistan in order to turn more forcefully to the very stern challenges of the third decade of the 21st century.