[Plenty of empires thrived
in what’s now Afghanistan, but our modern memory is shaped by a narrative
of disaster. Over the space of almost a century, the British launched three
variously ill-fated incursions beyond the Khyber Pass, bloody expeditions and
short-lived occupations mostly remembered outside the country, if at all,
as colonial
storybook adventures of the original “Great Game.” The grueling, decade-long
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s became the miserable coda to the
entire project of the U.S.S.R. — a quagmire, deepened by the supply of U.S. aid
and weaponry to the Afghan mujahideen, that preceded the end of the Cold War.]
Plenty of empires thrived
in what’s now Afghanistan, but our modern memory is shaped by a narrative
of disaster. Over the space of almost a century, the British launched three
variously ill-fated incursions beyond the Khyber Pass, bloody expeditions and
short-lived occupations mostly remembered outside the country, if at all,
as colonial
storybook adventures of the original “Great Game.” The grueling, decade-long
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s became the miserable coda to the
entire project of the U.S.S.R. — a quagmire, deepened by the supply of U.S. aid
and weaponry to the Afghan mujahideen, that preceded the end of the Cold War.
And then there’s the experience of
the United States. President Biden announced Wednesday that the United States
would unconditionally withdraw its forces from Afghanistan by Sept. 11 —
exactly 20 years after the events of 9/11, hatched by al-Qaeda on Afghan soil,
provoked a U.S. invasion to topple the then-ruling Taliban. The initial
punitive mission might have succeeded, but it turned into America’s longest
war, a Sisyphean exercise in counterinsurgency and state-building that
has seen more than 2,300 U.S. soldiers die, more than 20,000 wounded in action
and tens of thousands of Afghan civilians perish.
“We cannot continue the cycle of
extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan hoping to create
ideal conditions for our withdrawal, and expecting a different result,” Biden
said. “I am now the fourth American president to preside over an American troop
presence in Afghanistan. Two Republicans. Two Democrats. I will not pass this
responsibility to a fifth.”
What comes next is bound to be
tricky. In his remarks, Biden said he was moving ahead with
the basic outline of an agreement secured by then-President Donald Trump after
months of negotiations with the Taliban, though Trump had set the withdrawal
date for May 1. The Taliban still controls swaths of Afghan territory and may yet launch a new spring offensive in the coming
weeks, even as Western and regional officials pin their hopes on a slow-moving
peace process between the militants and the Afghan government.
“The Taliban — once derided as an
implacable terrorist threat that needed to be crushed — will almost certainly
seize a far greater role in the future Afghan government than U.S. officials
were willing to contemplate when the war started,” wrote my colleague Greg Jaffe. “Some analysts worry that
the U.S. exit could precipitate the collapse of the struggling Afghan army and
a worsening of the country’s civil war as various warlords fight for power. And
Afghan civilians, particularly women who enjoyed new rights and freedoms after
the Taliban’s initial defeat in 2001, will probably suffer immensely.”
In Washington, there are many
skeptics. Hawkish Republicans insisted that Biden was effectively ceding Afghanistan back to extremist elements and
paving the way for a new 9/11. In a conference call, David Petraeus, former
commanding general of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said he doubted the Biden administration’s ability to check
the Taliban’s advance without a troop presence in the country. “I’m really
afraid that we’re going to look back two years from now and regret the decision
and just wonder if whether we might not have sought to manage it with a modest,
sustainable, sustained commitment,” he said.
The Washington Post’s editorial board warned that, if the Biden
administration’s assessments prove wrong — and the Taliban doesn’t moderate its
fundamentalist views or participate in a good-faith political transition — it
“may simply result in the restoration of the 2001 status quo, including
terrorist bases that could force a renewed U.S. intervention.”
The president responded to this
line of argument. “There are many who loudly insist that
diplomacy cannot succeed without a robust U.S. military presence to stand as leverage,”
Biden said during his Wednesday speech, in which he emphasized the need
for the country to pivot and face new challenges, from China to
cyberwarfare to reckoning with the pandemic. “We gave that argument a decade.
It’s never proved effective. … Our diplomacy does not hinge on having boots in
harm’s way.”
As a mammoth 2019 Washington Post investigation into internal
government documents exposed, U.S. policymakers and military officials
for years recognized the futility of some of their efforts in Afghanistan as
the militant threat metastasized and U.S. aid cultivated whole economies built
on government corruption. But the need to both justify the American presence in
the country and also assert that the United States was winning — or could,
ultimately, win — in Afghanistan led officials to “deliberately mislead the
public,” my colleagues concluded.
The lessons of the past 20 years
are still being measured. Some suggest a political solution with the Taliban
ought to have been secured far earlier. “Negotiate early and negotiate often,”
Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told my colleagues. “You don’t win a war by destroying an
opposing army and occupying their capital. You win by making possible a
settlement that was not possible before the conflict started.”
Will Ruger, Trump’s nominee for
ambassador to Afghanistan, told Today’s WorldView that one of the legacies of
the war ought to be “greater humility about what the best military on the
planet can achieve and more thoughtfulness about how we deploy it.” Speaking
during a conference call held by the Defense Priorities think tank, he added that
Biden and future American leaders may still struggle with “right-sizing
American grand strategy for the challenges ahead of us.”
“After 9/11, the United States set
out to prove that it was the indispensable nation — that it could not merely
address a security threat but use spectacular power to transform other
countries,” Stephen Wertheim, deputy director of research and policy at the
Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank that
advocates foreign policy restraint, told Today’s WorldView.
Biden may not even believe this,
but “his action implies that the United States is a nation among nations, with
limited interests and responsibilities,” Wertheim added. “In that recognition
lies the start of a better foreign policy for the American people and the
world. Afghanistan is not the graveyard of the American empire — far from it.
But it may be the graveyard of America’s pretensions to global
indispensability.”
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