[The question is whether the small
contingent of American troops can accomplish anything after 20 years — and
whether full withdrawal would clear the way for Taliban advances.]
By Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger
Now President 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 very, very 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 American forces.
The deadline is a critical decision
point for Mr. Biden, and it will come months before the 20th anniversary of the
Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that prompted the American-led invasion of
Afghanistan to root out Al Qaeda.
Two decades later, the strategic
goals have shifted many times, from counterterrorism and democratization to
nation-building, and far more limited goals that President Barack Obama’s
administration called “Afghan good enough.” Mr. Biden — who argued as vice
president throughout Mr. 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.
Mr. 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. Mr. 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.
Mr. Biden has kept in place Zalmay
Khalilzad, the longtime diplomat who had negotiated the peace agreement under
President Donald J. 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 J. Blinken and the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan —
along with Jon Finer, Mr. Sullivan’s deputy.
By all accounts, Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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 American 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
Mr. 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
American troops and their NATO allies have fought and died for and spent
billions of dollars propping up.
In the panoply of foreign policy
decisions facing the president, he and his senior national security aides do
not view Afghanistan as the most far-reaching. The right relationship with
China is far more central to American prosperity. Carrying through on Mr.
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.
Mr. Katulis recalled bumping into
Mr. Biden at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, in 2008, when the
president was a senator visiting the country as part of a congressional tour
with his colleagues John Kerry, who would become secretary of state, and Chuck
Hagel, who would become secretary of defense. It was midnight in the hotel’s
executive club, Mr. Katulis recalled, and Mr. Biden wanted to chat South Asia.
For two hours.
“He was just energized by this
issue,” Mr. Katulis said.
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 J. Austin III. 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 Mr. Biden and Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Trump-Taliban 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 American-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,” Mr. 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 Mr. Biden falls on the spectrum.
When he was vice president, he
battled Pentagon leaders in urging his boss, Mr. Obama, to limit the number of
American troops in Afghanistan.
“Joe and a sizable number of N.S.C.
staffers,” Mr. Obama wrote in his memoir, “A Promised Land,” viewed a proposal
by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal to surge tens of thousands of troops into the
country “as just the latest attempt by an unrestrained military to drag the
country deeper into a futile, wildly expensive nation-building exercise, when
we could and should be narrowly focused on counterterrorism efforts.”
Although Mr. Biden lost the
argument in 2009, Mr. Obama came around to his position by the end of his
presidency after hundreds of Americans and allied troops had been killed and
the gains of the surge had been mostly lost to the Taliban.
Now Mr. Biden must decide whether
it is possible to defeat terrorist groups even if there is no physical troop
presence. Aides say he is acutely aware that most Americans are tired of the
war and doubtful that continued spending, in blood and treasure, will
accomplish anything. And Afghanistan, without doubt, has receded in the public
consciousness.
For Mr. Biden, that could change
the instant that Afghanistan is used again as a base from which to launch
another terrorist attack on the United States or Western targets. For an
example, he needs only to look to Iraq and the rise of the Islamic State in
Iraq and Syria, which followed Mr. Obama’s withdrawal of American troops in
2011 after the end of the combat mission there.
Critics contend that the Taliban
have not yet pledged to cut ties to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups
threatening the United States, as the February 2020 agreement called for.
Moreover, some analysts say that
the Taliban, bolstered by battlefield triumphs and success at the bargaining
table in Qatar in winning the release of more than 5,000 prisoners, remain
confident they can wait out the new administration and have little incentive to
compromise.
Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., a
retired four-star Marine general and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, who helped lead the Afghan Study Group, said the United States still had
leverage. General Dunford, a former top commander in Afghanistan, said that
beyond increased battlefield pressure, the Taliban want international
recognition as a legitimate political movement and a relief from punishing
economic sanctions.
One option gaining traction among
some former diplomats and Afghanistan specialists is for Washington, working
with its allies, to negotiate a month’s long extension to the troop withdrawal
deadline. That would buy time for the new administration to bolster the peace
talks in Qatar; rally support from other states in the region, including
Pakistan; and conduct a new assessment of the future terrorism threat in
Afghanistan.
“It won’t be easy, but it’s
feasible,” said Laurel E. Miller, a former top State Department official who
worked on Afghanistan and Pakistan diplomacy for Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump. “The
Taliban has an interest in keeping the process going because the process has
been working for them.”
If that approach fails, however,
the Taliban have threatened to resume attacks against American and other NATO
forces if the United States unilaterally decides to keep its 2,500 troops in
the country beyond the May deadline. The American forces are now hunkered down
in about a dozen bases and perform two main missions: counterterrorism
operations and advising Afghan security forces at various headquarters.
Preparing for the possibility of
renewed attacks against Americans, the military’s Central Command has been
ordered to draw up a wide range of options to cover whether troops stay or go,
and to counter even higher levels of Taliban violence, Pentagon officials say.
The administration could, for
instance, temporarily increase the number of troops in the country,
reversing Mr.
Trump’s order to cut forces in the final weeks of his term. That could
prove politically risky for Mr. Biden as he seeks to push higher-priority
legislation, such as pandemic relief, through Congress.
Another option would be to increase
the number of American airstrikes against Taliban targets across the country,
like the fighters threatening major Afghan cities such as Kabul and Kandahar.
This could require sending more strike aircraft to land on bases in the Middle
East or ensuring that an aircraft carrier with its strike wing is operating in
the Persian Gulf region, military officials said.
Kelly A. Ayotte, a former
Republican senator from New Hampshire and another leader of the congressionally
mandated Afghanistan commission, summed up the sentiment of not only panel
members but many administration officials.
“It is not whether we leave,” she
said, “but it’s how we leave.”
