Biden facing deadline for Afghanistan move

WASHI N G TON» The previous two presidents of the United States declared that they wanted to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, and they both decided in the end that they could not do it.

Now President Joe Biden is facing the same issue, with a deadline less than three months away.

The Pentagon, uncertain what the new commander in chief will do, is preparing variations on a plan to stay, a plan to leave and a plan to withdraw slowly — a reflection of the debate now swirling in the White House. The current deadline is May 1, in keeping with a much-violated peace agreement that calls for the complete withdrawal of the remaining 2,500 U.S. forces.

The deadline is a critical decision point for Biden, and it will come months before the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that prompted the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan to root out al-Qaeda.

Two decades later, the strategic goals have shifted many times, from counterterrorism and democratization to nationbuilding, and far more limited goals that President Barack Obama’s administration called “Afghan good enough.” Biden — who argued as vice president throughout Obama’s term for a minimal presence — will have to decide whether following his instincts to get out would run too high a risk of a takeover of the country’s key cities by the Taliban.

Biden, one senior aide noted, started his long career in the Senate just before the United States evacuated its personnel from Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam; the image of helicopters plucking Americans and a few Vietnamese from a roof was a searing symbol of a failed strategy. Biden is highly aware of the risks of something similar transpiring in Kabul, the Afghan capital, if all Western troops leave, and he has privately described the possibility as haunting, aides said.

But the president also questions whether the small remaining contingent of Americans can accomplish anything after 20 years in which almost 800,000 U.S. troops have deployed, or whether it will ever be possible to bring them home.

Biden has kept in place Zalmay Khalilzad, the longtime diplomat who had negotiated the peace agreement under President Donald Trump, in hopes of continuity in dealing with the Taliban and the Afghan government. But the key advisers on the issue are Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan — along with Jon Finer, Sullivan’s deputy.

By all accounts, Biden will be guided by his own experience, and he has yet to make a decision. Allies will be looking for some

indications at a NATO summit meeting that starts Wednesday, though Biden’s aides say they are not rushing a critical decision.

“We are conducting a rigorous review of the situation we’ve inherited, including all relevant options and with full consideration of the consequences of any potential course of action,” said Emily J. Horne, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council. “It would be wrong for anyone to assume the outcome of that process at this point.”

At the same time, the Taliban and the Afghan government are gearing up for a violent spring. Administration officials last week started discussions over how to proceed with Afghan officials whom Trump left out of his deal with the

Taliban.

One option under consideration, aides said, would be to extend the May 1 troop withdrawal deadline by six months to give all sides more time to decide how to proceed. But it is unclear that the Taliban would agree — or whether Biden would.

At the center of the decision-making is a new American president who has had to stand by for 20 years while other leaders ignored his advice on Afghanistan and committed large numbers of U.S. troops to a war effort there, overriding his argument that all the United States needed was a streamlined, focused counterterrorism presence.

The decision is harder because if Biden decides to withdraw, he will bear some responsibility — and much of the blame — if there is a collapse of the elected Afghan government that U.S. troops and their NATO allies have fought and died for and spent billions of dollars propping up.

Among foreign policy decisions, Biden and his senior national security aides do not view Afghanistan as the most far-reaching. The right relationship with China is more central to American prosperity. Carrying through on Biden’s promise not to let Russia roll over the United States is more important to its security. The Iranian nuclear program looms over Middle East calculations. Afghanistan is deeply personal to him, and the most influential voice the president will listen to may be his own.

“His head is more in the game on this because he has been connecting with these people around the world for years,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank with close ties to the Biden administration.

The May 1 deadline, enshrined in a peace deal reached with the Taliban nearly a year ago, will be the focus of the meeting in Brussels this week of allied defense ministers, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. There are now more than twice as many troops from NATO allies in Afghanistan as there are Americans, and as they gauge their own commitment to the country, they are looking to Biden and Austin for a road map.

The president is already being lobbied by the same voices that, for the past 20 years, have advocated maintaining at least a limited troop presence in Afghanistan.

In December, before Biden was inaugurated, the bipartisan, congressionally appointed Afghan Study Group run by the United States Institute of Peace met with his foreign policy advisers to brief them on a report on Afghanistan. The report, which was released Feb. 3, argued, in essence, for abandoning the May 1 timetable by saying that the Taliban had not met the conditions for a U.S. withdrawal as set by the TrumpTaliban agreement.

The group said that going to zero troops, as the Trump-Taliban agreement called for, would lead to civil war, set back American interests in the region and render pointless the sacrifice of 3,500 coalition troops killed prosecuting the U.S.-led war effort in Afghanistan.

John F. Kirby, the new Pentagon press secretary, insisted that the Biden administration stood by the agreement, with its commitment for a full troop withdrawal, but he expressed pessimism that the Taliban would do what they were supposed to: Cut ties with al-Qaeda and reduce violence.

“Without them meeting their commitments to renounce terrorism and to stop the violent attacks against the Afghan National Security Forces, it’s very hard to see a specific way forward for the negotiated settlement,” Kirby said. “But we’re still committed to that.”

But that was the standard line from the Pentagon even during the Trump administration. What is unclear at this point is where Biden falls on the spectrum.