Debating exit, Biden rejected generals’ views
President refused to keep residual force
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden used his daily national security briefing on the morning of April 6 to deliver the news that his senior military leaders suspected was coming. He wanted all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
In the Oval Office, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wanted to make certain. “I take what you said as a decision, sir,” Milley said, according to officials with knowledge of the meeting. “Is that correct, Mr. President?” It was.
Over two decades of war that spanned four presidents, the Pentagon had always managed to fend off the political instincts of elected leaders frustrated with the grind of Afghanistan as commanders repeatedly requested more time and more troops. Even as the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan steadily decreased to the 2,500 who still remained, Defense Department leaders still cobbled together a military effort that managed to protect the United States from terrorist attacks even as it failed, spectacularly, to defeat the Taliban in a place that has crushed foreign occupiers for 2,000 years.
The current military leadership hoped it, too, could convince a new president to maintain at least a modest troop presence, trying to talk Biden into keeping a residual force and setting conditions on any withdrawal. But Biden refused to be persuaded.
The two Pentagon leaders stood before Biden near the same Resolute Desk where President George W. Bush reviewed plans in 2001 to send in elite Special Operations troops to hunt for Osama bin Laden, only to see bin Laden melt over the border into Pakistan.
It was the same desk where President Barack Obama decided on a surge of forces in 2009, followed by a rapid drawdown, only to discover that the Afghan military was not able to defend itself despite billions of dollars in training.
It was there that President Donald Trump declared all U.S. troops were coming home — but never carried through a plan to do so.
There would be no conditions put on the withdrawal, Biden told the men, cutting off the last thread — one that had worked with Trump and that Austin and Milley hoped could stave off a full drawdown. They were told zero meant zero.
In that moment, the war — which had been debated across four presidents, prosecuted with thousands of commando raids, cost 2,400 American fatalities and 20,000 injured, with progress never quite being made — began its final chapter. It will be over, Biden has promised, by the 20th anniversary of the attacks that stunned the world and led to more than 13,000 airstrikes.
For Biden, it came down to a simple choice, according to officials with knowledge of the debate: acknowledge that the Afghan government and its fragile security forces would need a U.S. troop presence to prop them up indefinitely, or leave.
“No one wants to say that we should be in Afghanistan forever, but they insist now is not the right moment to leave,” Biden said in announcing his decision Wednesday. “So, when will it be the right moment to leave? One more year? Two more years? Ten more years?”
Biden had joined 97 other senators on Sept. 14, 2001, to vote in favor of going to war in Afghanistan. He had even been in favor of the Iraq War the next year.
But Biden turned on both endeavors and told anyone who would listen, in expository speeches that sometimes lasted for hours.
In 2008, during visits to Afghanistan as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he “found confusion at all levels about our strategy and objectives,” Robert Gates, the former defense secretary, wrote in a memoir, Duty. Biden was so frustrated with the Afghan leadership, Gates added, that he once threw down his napkin and walked out of a dinner with President Hamid Karzai.
As vice president, Biden clashed with the Pentagon, including Gates, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about troop levels in the country, arguing for bringing them down to a minimal counterterrorism force. (He lost that battle.) And Biden was furious, Obama reported in his memoir, at generals who were trying to force a decision to commit additional troops with leaks saying that if more were not sent, the result would be mission failure.
Obama wrote that Biden used a vivid epithet and warned him about generals who “are trying to box in a new president.” The vice president leaned forward, putting his face “a few inches from mine and stage-whispered, ‘Don’t let them jam you,’ ” Obama recalled.