Biden takes two paths to wind down two wars
When it comes to winding down America’s wars, the contrast between President Joe Biden’s handling of Iraq and Afghanistan is growing sharper.
At the White House yesterday, Biden promised Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi of Iraq that the United States would end its combat mission there by the end of the year. “We’re not going to be, by the end of the year, in a combat mission,” he said.
But the president also made it clear that most of the 2500 US troops stationed in Iraq would remain, simply reclassified on paper into advisory and training roles. The United States’ role, he said, would be “to continue to train, to assist, to help, and to deal with Isis as it arrives”.
In Afghanistan, however, the US is making a far cleaner break, pulling out troops and formally ending its military mission by the end of August.
Biden has also declared that the mission of denying terrorists a haven in the country had long ago been achieved and that leaving forces on the ground was no longer worth the cost of blood and
money.
The different ways that the president has handled the two wars, which began after the September 11, 2001, attacks, offer insight not only into America’s strategic interests, but also into how Biden views the two conflicts.
In pulling out of Afghanistan, Biden said there was no longer any justification to believe that the US could turn the country into a stable democracy.
But in the conflict in Iraq, another decades-old war that many view as more costly than the one in Afghanistan, he sees an American presence as necessary, at least in part, to ward off the influence of Iran and the continuing threat of Isis.
Former US president Donald Trump also created political pressure for Biden to extricate the US from Afghanistan. Biden Administration officials said they were committed to honouring an agreement the Trump Administration had signed with the Taliban in February 2020 for US troops to pull out of Afghanistan. Trump made no such pact about a withdrawal of forces from Iraq.
The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, declined to specify the number of troops that would remain in Iraq. “The numbers will be driven by what is needed for the mission over time,” she said.
That mission is strategically important to the US. Even though the Isis physical caliphate is long gone, military counterterrorism officials estimate that the militant group still has between 8000 and 16,000 guerrilla fighters operating in Iraq and Syria.
The American forces in Iraq also support about 900 US troops in neighbouring Syria, where the American-backed Syrian Democratic Forces continue to carry out ground operations against Isis in the country’s northeast.
If the US were to withdraw from Iraq, it would make supporting the Syria mission much more difficult.
Many Biden Administration officials are also haunted by the failed withdrawal from Iraq in 2011.
The US was pulled back in three years later after James Foley, an American journalist, was beheaded by Isis in August 2014 for a propaganda video and the group seized the northern third of the country.
As head of US forces in Iraq, General Lloyd Austin oversaw the 2011 withdrawal mission. He now serves as Biden’s Defence Secretary.
Richard Haass, the president of the