About face
Why Republicans need to resist a full withdrawal from Afghanistan
WHEN President Biden announced that American troops will withdraw from Afghanistan, ending a nearly 20 year war in that country, he likely counted on solid Republican support for the plan. After all, President Trump also announced his own prospective departure from Afghanistan, setting it for May 1, 2021.
As a result, many prominent Republicans, elected and otherwise, are either endorsing Biden’s plan or declining to criticize it. A PoliticoMorning Consult survey places Republican approval for Biden’s policy at 42 percent compared to 59 percent of registered voters nationally — a not insignificant showing of bipartisan agreement in a polarized time.
Nonetheless, support for Trump’s policy should not automatically entail support for Biden’s.
As president, Trump changed the GOP’s foreign-policy calculus, shifting the party away from the neoconservative nation-building and democracy-planting embraced so thoroughly by the Bush administration. In its place, he offered a helpful recalibration of America’s foreignpolicy scales. Recognizing, correctly, that ideological objectives had obscured the national interest, he called for decades of foreign entanglement to give way to a new, postwar era of domestic investment and prosperity.
Republicans should be wary, however, of allowing a proper shift in priorities to lurch into a new form of counterproductive isolationism — one that could endanger the American homeland.
Any decisions should be made on the basis of facts, rather than ideology, and the facts in Afghanistan today are these: With a residual force of approximately 3,000 troops, the US has kept the Taliban from overrunning the country and maintained a fragile, democratically elected government in Kabul. In the years since September 11, 2001, Afghanistan has not been an easy refuge for al Qaeda or other terrorist groups that threaten America. And freedoms unknown under Taliban rule — especially for women and girls — have produced hope for a future in civil society. These are concrete and important gains, earned by the lives and treasure of the US and its allies — and directly relevant to American national security.
And yet, as Biden proceeds to withdraw troops by Aug. 31, America’s former commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Scott Miller, has warned of an emerging “civil war.” As The
Wall Street Journal reports, US intelligence already anticipates the likely end of that war: In just six months, Afghanistan’s government may collapse in defeat to the Taliban.
These realities provide ample evidence as to why Trump never actually executed a complete departure from Afghanistan, however much he wanted to do so, and however much he talked about it.
Another crucial fact must be considered: If America is to leave Afghanistan, it matters just who is setting that policy and what the real plans and objectives are.
Will the Taliban fear retaliation from Biden as they would have from Trump, should they again harbor international terrorism? Biden and his administration make noise about continued support for the Afghan military, but will significant help ever materialize?
This seems doubtful, especially given the administration’s highly convenient, disingenuous expressions of confidence in Afghan defense capability.
Listening to John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, speak of Afghanistan’s “very capable Air Force” and “very sophisticated” special forces, one would think that the undertrained, already-overwhelmed Afghan military is an elite fighting unit, able to repel the Taliban’s rapidly advancing onslaught on its own. US intelligence agencies — and common sense — would disagree.
A presidential policy is never made in the abstract. It is, instead, shaped and determined by the president who enacts it.
For a clue to the future of Afghanistan during the Biden administration, one can look to the last time the US made a precipitous, forced, illplanned departure from a theater of conflict. President Obama’s withdrawal of troops from Iraq in 2011 led directly to the rise of ISIS — a threat Obama severely underestimated, and which he compared to “a JV team.” The territorial ISIS caliphate was defeated only after the arrival of a different president with a very different approach: Trump, whose more aggressive military strategy turned the tide.
America should maintain its residual force in Afghanistan and protect its national security gains, purchased with such sacrifice over two decades. Republicans should also recognize: A complete Biden departure from the conflict does not equal a hypothetical Trump departure. This is a fact that the Taliban and its allies understand all too well.