President Biden faces a dilemma that he would rather not see. At some point in the coming months, he will have to either pour more troops into Afghanistan or withdraw altogether. There is almost no other real option.
The United States currently has 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, the lowest number since the war began 20 years ago. An agreement President Trump signed with the Taliban calls on all US troops to leave the country by May 1. In turn, the Taliban pledged to distance themselves from terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and refrain from attacking civilians. They have not met either condition.
So should Biden stay or leave after May 1? The problem goes beyond numbers. The president and his assistants are conducting a policy review, and the review should pose a fundamental question: After all this time in Afghanistan, what do we want to achieve and is that goal achievable? If not, should we cut our losses and go home?
Currently, US forces are mainly involved in counter-terrorism against Al Qaeda and to some extent ISIS. Last year, only ten Americans died in Afghanistan, only four of them in combat. But if there are still US troops in the country after May 1, the Taliban will force them into combat – and the US will need more than 2,500 troops for that. And when attacked by the Taliban, they can’t do much against Al Qaeda either. Reinforcement would be needed and more Americans would die or the mission would be doomed.
Complicating matters is that the US is not the only country whose stakes are at stake. Other NATO countries have about 8,000 troops in Afghanistan. They are unlikely to stick around when the Americans withdraw. And if Biden stays inside, they want to know the plan anyway.
In his long career, Biden has witnessed disastrous troop withdrawals and fruitless escalations. He was a freshman senator during the haunting spectacle of American helicopters leaving the embassy in Saigon, leaving many loyal Vietnamese behind. And he was vice president when Barack Obama, in his first year as president, decided to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, bringing the total to nearly 100,000, and to pursue a new strategy of counterinsurgency, aka ” nation-building ‘.
Biden was the only National Security Council official to oppose that force and instead advocated deploying just 10,000 additional troops and using them strictly to combat Al-Qaeda terrorists and to train the Afghan army. He argued that nation building wouldn’t work, given the Afghan government’s corruption – and he was right. Obama reached the same conclusion after 18 months of trying, withdrew most of his troops, and took over Biden’s more limited targets. When he left office, Obama kept 8,000 troops in Afghanistan – not so much to help reform the country, but to use the country as a base to put pressure on al-Qaeda on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Trump was inclined to withdraw all troops, but his advisers, especially Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and National Security Adviser HR McMaster, convinced him otherwise, selling him a “new strategy” that would lead to “victory.” Actually, it was just a slightly improved version of the old strategy, and it didn’t get us any closer to defining “victory”, let alone achieving it. So after recruiting a more lenient group of advisers, Trump went back to his original plan. He hired a capable former ambassador and native Afghan, Zalmay Khalilzad, to lead the peace talks with the Taliban (against the Afghan government’s resistance). They made a deal. May 1 was the withdrawal date for US troops. But, as noted earlier, the Taliban didn’t stick to their side of the bargain, and now Biden is on the verge of not holding our side either.
Biden’s middle-of-the-road approach from ten years ago will not work now if the Afghan government collapses and the Taliban fight against US forces. So, again, should Biden dive in further or get out? His previous positions, as a senator and vice president, don’t make him too keen to do either.
There are some questions no interaction group has ever seriously asked, but are now worthwhile. First, does it matter if there are US troops in Afghanistan? The standard answer is that, if we leave, Al-Qaeda will come back to roar and use it again as a stopping place to attack the United States, as they did on 9/11. But one thing we’ve learned from the various terrorist plots of the past decade is that if bad guys want to plot attacks on America and its allies, they don’t need a training base in Afghanistan.
Another answer – the one Obama cited to justify keeping 8,000 troops in the country – is that it is worth having a military base in the area, if only for Pakistan, a turbulent country. with nuclear weapons, to keep an eye on and to insure India. , which has some presence in Afghanistan as a way of enveloping Pakistan, of our support. This is the most compelling argument for staying in, even if just a little bit, (the humanitarian argument for preventing the Taliban’s oppressive rule, especially against women, is another) and if it is impossible to Staying indoors a little, we may need to expand our presence a little. A few years ago, there may have been a way to form an alliance with other powers with converging interests in the region – China, Russia, possibly Iran – but the tensions with all three now make this a fantasy.
Another way out – the only way to avoid the otherwise inescapable dilemma – is to make a deal with the Taliban and the Afghan government to extend the May 1 deadline and keep talking. The Taliban may not have agreed; they think they have us on the run, and in a way they do, so why give us a break? Khalilzad, who is still the US envoy, may need to come up with a smart solution to extend this deadlock. I don’t know what this would be; I hope he has some ideas. Biden may have no choice but to urge him and give him enormous leeway, no matter what he comes up with.
Does it kick the can on the road like the old saw has it? Yes, but that’s better than the alternatives.
The central problem is the problem that the vice president saw in 2009: the corruption of the Afghan government. American top officers saw that then too. During Senate hearings in September of that year, a few months before Obama decided to send more troops, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had an interesting exchange of views with Senator Lindsey Graham. The Taliban were gaining ground, and Graham wanted to know why. The problem, Mullen said, “is clearly the lack of legitimacy of the [Afghan] government. “
Graham continued the point. “We could send a million troops, and that wouldn’t restore legitimacy in government?” he asked.
Mullen replied, “That’s right.” A few minutes later, under questioning of Senator Susan Collins, Mullen re-emphasized the point. To defeat the Taliban, he said, “the Afghan government must have some legitimacy in the eyes of the people. The core problem is corruption … That threat is just as important as the Taliban. “
Nevertheless, Mullen, Graham, and Collins have all urged Obama – and Obama decided – to send more troops. Mullen, General David Petraeus and other American officers also said around this time that there was no way to win the war militarily; it would end only through political settlement. And yet they all insisted that we wait for the US and NATO to win some major battles so that we could get to the negotiating table with leverage – to get the best deal possible. But we never won some major battles and the Afghan government remained corrupt, without legitimacy.
And so President Biden, who saw the situation most clearly in 2009 and endorsed a policy consistent with that vision, is likely in the same dilemma as his predecessors – although I don’t think he will fall into the trap of escalation, he will not send one Lake troops. He will simply instruct his team to find the best or least bad way to muddle through.
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