Closing book on 20 years of conflict
Biden draws line under war in Afghanistan
President Joe Biden’s decision to pull all United States troops from Afghanistan by September 11 was rooted in his belief that there is no room for continuing 20 years of failed efforts to remake that country, especially at a moment when he wants the US focused on a transformational economic and social agenda at home and other fast-evolving threats from abroad.
Though Biden would never use the term, getting out of Afghanistan is part of his own version of “America First,” one that differs drastically from how his predecessor, Donald Trump, used the phrase.
His years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as vicepresident convinced him that the USled effort in Afghanistan was destined to collapse of its own weight.
Time and again during the Obama Administration, Biden lost arguments to reduce the American presence to a minimal counterterrorism force. But after less than three months as president, Biden came to the determination that only a full withdrawal — with no link to political conditions on the ground — would wrench America’s attention away from the conflict of the past two decades in favour of the very different kinds he expects in the next two.
He has defined his presidency’s goals as releasing the country from the grip of a virus that is morphing into new variants, seizing an opportunity to bolster economic competitiveness against China and proving to the world that American democracy can still rise to great challenges.
And in that vision, the priorities are fighting poverty and racial inequities and increasing investment in broadband, semiconductors, artificial intelligence and 5G communications — not using the military to prop up the Government of President Ashraf Ghani. It means thinking about infrastructure instead of force protection, and defending commercial supply chains instead of military supply lines.
Biden’s approach carries clear risks.
The annual worldwide threat assessment published by his intelligence chiefs yesterday, as word of his decision leaked, explicitly warned that “the Afghan Government will struggle to hold the Taliban at bay” if the US-led coalition withdraws. Administration officials said that raised the spectre of something akin to the 1975 fall of Saigon, after the US gave up on another ill-considered war.
But Biden’s decision makes clear his belief that contending with a rising China takes precedence over the idea that with just a few more years in Afghanistan, and a few more billions of dollars, the US could achieve with a few thousand troops what it could not achieve with hundreds of thousands and the more than $2 trillion already poured into two decades of war-fighting and nation-building.
After Biden declared at a news conference last month that “We’ve got to prove democracy works,” he went on to describe a foreign policy that was focused on restoring America’s reputation for getting big things done. “China is outinvesting us by a long shot,” the President noted, “because their plan is to own that future.”
Indeed, no one celebrated the American involvement in Afghanistan, or Iraq, more than the Chinese — conflicts that kept Americans up at night worrying about casualties and taking control of distant provinces, while Beijing focused on spreading its influence in regions of the world where America was once the unquestioned dominant power.
Several years ago, at China’s Central Party School, a recently retired Chinese military officer said his colleagues marvelled at how the US was wasting its assets.
Yesterday, one of Biden’s top advisers suggested that the President had come to the same conclusion. To address the threats and challenges of 2021 rather than those of 2001, he said, “requires us to close the book on a 20-year conflict in Afghanistan”.
But that choice comes with considerable risks. His advisers acknowledged that the President would take the blame if Afghanistan collapsed into the hands of the Taliban or again became a haven for terrorists intent on striking the US. Biden’s critics wasted no time painting the decision as a sign of the US in retreat, ignoring that only six months ago, Trump declared, erroneously it turned out, that he would have all US troops home for Christmas. And while Democrats were generally supportive, some expressed concern about maintaining the ability to deal militarily with the emergence of a threat from Afghanistan.
Historians may conclude Biden’s decision was predestined. The place is not called the Graveyard of Empires for nothing: The British pulled out in 1842, after an expedition their textbooks call the “disaster in Afghanistan,” and the Soviets in 1989, after a decade of death and frustration. What Soviet leaders learned in a decade, four American presidents learned over the span of two.
In short, Biden is declaring that war is over — no matter what, and even
though the US is leaving with most of its goals unmet, and Afghanistan’s stability deeply in jeopardy. If there is no terrorist attack launched from Afghan territory again, no echo of September 11, 2001, Biden may well have been judged to have made the right bet.
The argument that won the day is that the future of Kenosha is more important than defending Kabul. And if Biden can truly focus the country on far bigger strategic challenges — in space and cyberspace, against declining powers like Russia and rising ones like China — he will have finally moved the country out of its post-9/11 fixation, where counterterrorism over-rode every other foreign policy and domestic imperative.
That would be a real change in the way Americans think about the purpose of the country’s influence and power, and the nature of national security.