WASHINGTON D.C.: When President Biden came into office, he believed the right thing for the country was to end the longest war in American history and bring American troops home. As he laid out to the American people, after twenty years, the United States had accomplished its mission in Afghanistan: to remove from the battlefield the terrorists who attacked the United States on 9/11, including Osama bin Laden, and degrade the terrorist threat to the United States.
Two decades after the war had started, America had become bogged down in a war in Afghanistan with unclear objectives and no end in sight and was underinvesting in today’s and tomorrow’s national security challenges. President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor. When former President Trump took office in 2017, there were more than 10,000 troops in Afghanistan. Eighteen months later, after introducing more than 3,000 additional troops just to maintain the stalemate, President Trump ordered direct talks with the Taliban without consulting with the U.S. allies and partners or allowing the Afghan government at the negotiating table. In February 2020, the United States and the Taliban reached a deal, known as the Doha Agreement, under which the United States agreed to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by May 2021.
When President Biden announced his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan, some voices doubted that America would be on a safer and stronger footing as a result. President Biden promised Americans that we would maintain an enduring capacity to address terrorist threats in Afghanistan without thousands of boots on the ground. In July 2022, he demonstrated that capability in the successful operation that killed the emir of al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri. In addition, when President Biden made his decision in 2021, he rightly recognized that the terrorist threat of today is more diverse and diffuse than it was in 2001. His decision to leave Afghanistan freed up critical military, intelligence, and other resources to counter terrorist threats around the world, including in Syria, Iraq, Somalia, and Yemen. The Administration has done so successfully, including by eliminating ISIS leader Hajji Abdullah and a number of top ISIS leaders in Syria and Somalia through continued U.S. counterterrorism efforts.
Biden administration also remained committed to supporting significant humanitarian assistance and standing up for the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan and has continued to condemn and isolate the Taliban for its appalling human rights record. More broadly, when the President made the decision to leave Afghanistan, some worried that doing so could weaken our alliances or put the United States at a disadvantage on the global stage. The opposite has happened. The United States standing around the world rose significantly greater, as evidenced by multiple opinion surveys and their alliances grew stronger than ever.
The briefing in which the 12-page summary came under debate as White House reporters fired questions on John Kirby, he responded to a reporter’s question who asked what pride you take in your mission when the chaos was witnessed all over the world. Kirby responded that “Finland has been admitted into NATO, and Sweden will soon be admitted as well. We are strengthening our existing partnerships and building new ones with nations around the world. On the global stage, America is leading”. Kirby further added that “we have rallied our allies and partners to support Ukraine and hold Russia accountable for its aggression—and to rise to compete with China. It is hard to imagine the United States would have been able to lead the response to these challenges as successfully—especially in the resource-intensive way that it has— if U.S. forces remained in Afghanistan today”.
Ultimately, after more than twenty years, more than $2 trillion dollars, and standing up an Afghan army of 300,000 soldiers, the speed and ease with which the Taliban took control of Afghanistan suggests that there was no scenario—except a permanent and significantly expanded U.S. military presence—that would have changed the trajectory.
As President Biden said on August 31, 2021: “When I hear that we could’ve, should’ve continued the so-called low-grade effort in Afghanistan, at low risk to our service members, at low cost, I don’t think enough people understand how much we have asked of the 1 percent of this country who put that uniform on, who are willing to put their lives on the line in defense of our nation…There is nothing low-grade or low-risk or low cost about any war”.
