Right to end war
Like Trump before him, Biden believes the Afghanistan campaign cannot last forever.
In urging caution ahead of America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell warned President George W. Bush that if we introduced new chaos by overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his murderous regime, we’d be responsible for whatever came next. “You break it, you own it,” he said.
Bush, tragically, pushed forward anyway and succeeded in both toppling a tyrant and sending Iraq straight into the abyss, with thousands of our troops and nearly a trillion dollars and our international standing right with it. U.S. forces would remain in Iraq for eight years before President Barack Obama pulled the last troops out by December 2011.
Disaster ensued, of course. Filling the vacuum left by our departure, ISIS introduced a level of barbarism to the region that not even the war-weary Iraqis themselves had imagined possible. Even as the terror rose throughout the region, Obama refused to reengage in Iraq beyond eventually sending a token force of 5,000 troops back, insisting that Iraq itself would have to fight this new war.
In time, Iraq did just that, declaring victory over ISIS in 2017. President Donald Trump, continuing Obama’s policy of keeping our troop levels low, began withdrawing those forces again in 2018, though precise figures of how many and how soon were not disclosed. In 2018 Trump declared ISIS was defeated in neighboring Syria as well.
Against this backdrop, President Joe Biden has announced that the remaining troops in the other war launched after 9/11 — in Afghanistan, and on much stronger grounds — will be home by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of al-Qaida’s monstrous attack on the United States.
There are roughly 2,500 troops there now, with another 1,000 members of the Special Forces.
“I'm now the fourth U.S. president to preside over a troop presence in Afghanistan — two Republicans, two Democrats,” Biden said Wednesday. “I will not pass this responsibility to a fifth.”
The United States has already agreed to remove our troops, under a deal negotiated last year by the Taliban and Trump, who had steadily reduced our footprint there. Many had hoped Biden would reverse that position, however. We’re glad he didn’t.
Trump’s basic instincts on ending “forever wars” were correct. His call in November, however, to bring the troops home by Christmas brought many objections, including by this editorial board. Ending the war there is “not something that should be done without careful and deliberate planning by competent military experts to guarantee the safety of our troops, protect our allies and preserve the successes of the mission,” we wrote then, noting that Trump’s sudden news came amid a broad purge of military leaders. Devoid of an overarching foreign policy, the president’s rush to end our longest war smacked of expediency.
Biden’s decision, explained in a speech Wednesday, resolves those concerns, and we support his decision to end the war in Afghanistan.
He is taking enormous risks in doing so.
Republican critics — including many deeply knowledgeable about foreign policy, such as Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas — have blasted his decision, raising the specter of another ISIS-like force rushing to fill the vacuum our troops’ absence could create, as happened in Iraq.
These are reasonable fears. Undoubtedly, Afghanistan will face terrible trials in the months and years ahead. But to those objections, we simply ask: If 20 years, and four administrations, haven’t been enough to let Afghanistan stand on its own, why would another six months, or two years, or even a fifth administration succeed where so many have already failed?
Nearly 50 years ago, as South Vietnam faced oblivion at the hands of the North, its government called on President Gerald Ford to keep America’s commitments to help the South should its very survival be threatened. Congress said no, and the horrors that followed as the North Vietnamese overwhelmed their enemies and sent millions into re-education camps are enough to pull tears down the cheeks of even the most stoic.
Bitter as the knowledge was, what Congress knew then — and Biden knows now — is that sending troops and treasure back into Vietnam might have prevented the South’s collapse for a season or a year, but that a nation that cannot stand on its own will eventually fall.
What will happen after America withdraws from Afghanistan? We can hope the investments made over the past 20 years — the better schools and roads, the newly respected human rights for women and others, and stronger civil institutions — will be a bulwark in a new Afghanistan’s efforts to remain free of the Taliban.
If enough Afghans yearn to be free of tyranny, then perhaps Biden will have gambled correctly that our continued diplomatic and humanitarian engagement with Afghanistan — even without troops on the ground — will be enough to stop a complete collapse of the government in Kabul and render impossible new terrorist attacks against America and our allies.
No president can predict the future, but this one has concluded — reasonably — that no war should continue forever, either.