Biden’s bravery on Afghanistan
Joe Biden was right on Afghanistan. It is no mean thing to stare down America’s senior military leadership, on a military question, and force them to give up. But it was the right call. The irony is that Joe Biden was also right before, back in 2009, when the Obama administration went through its first Afghanistan policy review and decided on surging 30,000 more troops to the country for a major counterinsurgency campaign. Biden was skeptical of that decision; he had wanted a light footprint of troops just to go after targets like Al Qaeda.
The Obama administration’s Afghanistan debate in 2009 was the height of America’s counterinsurgency fetish. The U.S. was fresh off a victory in Iraq, or if not a victory, then not quite as big a disaster as expected given the first four years after the invasion. Iraq had been saved from slipping into a civil war by a surge of U.S. troops into Iraqi population centers, particularly Baghdad. This tamped down a brewing sectarian conflict and combined with a rejection of Al Qaeda by the Anbar tribes led to significantly increased stability in 2008.
Though Obama had run hard against the Bush foreign policy, and particularly its enthusiasm for armed democracy promotion, he had also promised a renewed commitment to Afghanistan. Afghanistan was the good war, and had been neglected by Bush. As the Iraq War began, Afghanistan had been starved of troops and then rushed resources only in 2008 when the insurgency was already in full bloom.
The policy decision Obama faced was whether to apply the lessons of the surge to this new failing conflict. He first appointed a new commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who along with David Petraeus and Michael Flynn had probably done more than any other American to defeat Al Qaeda in the years after 9/11. McChrystal was enthusiastic about taking the Iraq-style fight back to the Taliban.
McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan was solid. Afghanistan did not have the concentrated urban areas of Iraq, and was far more ethnically and geographically riven, but by using U.S. forces to control population centers particularly along the Kandahar-Kabul road the coalition would be able to stabilize key parts of the country. Stop the drift, give the Afghans confidence in their own security, and then disrupt the Taliban networks in remote areas like Helmand Province with highend forces.
After a long deliberation, Obama gave McChrystal many of the troops he needed.
Biden didn’t buy it then, and he turned out to be right. I was one of those surged troops, serving with the Army as an adviser to one of McChrystal’s successors. And what was most misleading on the ground is that progress was real, but the structures we had put in place — the type of stability we sought — were also unsustainable.
In fact, almost the entire counterinsurgency idea turned out to be inapplicable in Afghanistan, and even in Iraq. Within years of U.S. forces leaving Baghdad, the country collapsed back into sectarian civil war. Despite the 100,000 U.S. forces committed to Afghanistan, lasting success — even lasting security — would only come as long as there were Americans present.
This was the central flaw in Bush-era counterinsurgency, one that the military didn’t see: the time axis. Counterinsurgency could work as long as sufficient resources were deployed. But the number of troops and amount of money necessary to make it work were not sustainable on any timeline that was realistic for democratic nations to be at war. It didn’t work.
Biden sensed it didn’t work at the time of the 2009 Afghanistan surge. He thought it was too ambitious, too optimistic in the longterm willingness of Americans to fight for successes along the margin. Had his argument carried the day, there would be Americans alive now who are not.
Donald Trump was right, too, as it happens. It is a little galling that Biden’s withdrawal announcement was met with — let us be generous — somewhat less hand-wringing than Trump’s was, when this president is operating off functionally the same timeline that his predecessor negotiated.
But credit where due: Biden did not agree to a temporary increase of forces, or a significantly extended departure date, all of which would have been easy to do. Almost certainly, there is no foreign policy decision Trump regrets more than allowing his second national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, to talk him into something similar back in 2017. It is not easy to say no to the experts, uniformed and civilian, when they are so deeply invested and knowledgeable about a cause. It is even less easy to acknowledge the consequences that the Afghan people will have to endure in the future. But this decision was needed under Trump and is even more so now. Good for Joe Biden.