The U.S. Was Right to Leave Afghanistan

O ne year ago, the last U.S. troops flew out of Kabul International Airport in the dead of night, ending the longest war in U.S. history. The event was a milestone for the very simple reason that, for the first time in 20 years, Americans could wake up in the morning knowing there isn’t a single U.S. soldier operating on Afghan soil. There were no celebrations or ticker-tape parades: only a collective sense of relief that Washington was disassociating itself from an unwinnable “war.”

Critics of the U.S. troop withdrawal, however, are using the first anniversary of this weighty decision as an opportunity to relitigate the debate on their own terms. Unfortunately for them, the case for staying in Afghanistan remains just as poor as it always was.

The critiques have come from the usual quarters. Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) alleged that the Afghanistan withdrawal “enticed Putin to invade Ukraine” and persuaded China to rattle Taiwan militarily. In these pages, Senator Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) argued that the removal of U.S. forces was a slap in the face of Afghan women and girls, who are now forced to live with the depravities of a second Taliban regime. Still others, like General Kenneth McKenzie, who oversaw all U.S. troops in Afghanistan, claim that keeping a residual U.S. presence of around 2,500 personnel could have averted the humiliating collapse of the Afghan government. General David Petraeus, the architect of the 2007–08 surge in Iraq and a former commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, faulted “a lack of American strategic patience” for the war’s inglorious end.

Granted, the Taliban’s nationwide offensive in August 2021 was a shock to the U.S. intelligence community and to Biden personally, who admitted a day after the Taliban’s capture of Kabul that the Afghan army fell apart “more quickly than we had anticipated.” Yet none of the withdrawal’s critics sufficiently explains why U.S. interests would have been best served by extending an intervention to keep a failed state from collapsing.

The Afghan state was tottering long before bearded Taliban militants took over Ashraf Ghani’s office in the presidential compound. In December 2018, about two and a half years before the fall of Kabul, General McKenzie testified that Afghan security forces were experiencing unsustainable casualties. The next month, the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction reported that only about half of Afghanistan’s districts were controlled or influenced by the Afghan government, which since its very establishment was riddled with a systemic corruption problem that Afghan politicians were largely uninterested in addressing.

Despite over $80 billion in direct U.S. military aid, the Afghan army and national police were almost totally dependent on U.S. and foreign contractors for support. While the Afghans could fly their own aircraft, and operate military equipment, they couldn’t repair or maintain it. Afghan ground forces were being ambushed by Taliban militants at static checkpoints, and Afghan commanders who were being advised to rely less on these positions brushed off the suggestion. By the time the Taliban captured its first provincial center on August 6, 2021, the Afghan army was already in rough shape, and many of the troops were essentially fighting without pay.

Would maintaining a U.S. posture of roughly 2,500 troops have prevented the Afghan government’s fall, as McKenzie insists? The U.S. actually increased troop levels in August 2021 to 5,000 in order to assist the evacuation process, double what McKenzie had recommended to U.S. policy-makers at the time. Yet it had no effect whatsoever on preventing Taliban fighters from roaming the streets of Kabul unopposed.

PHOTOS: Afghanistan Evacuation

Observers such as McKenzie and Petraeus may reject the notion that withdrawing completely was the only good option U.S. policy-makers had left. But the alternatives were terrible and would have been far more costly to U.S. forces than it was for them to accept the infeasibility of the situation and pack their bags. Hypothetically, President Biden could have chosen to keep a military presence in Afghanistan past his September 11 withdrawal date in a vain attempt to give the Afghan government more time to get its act together. Yet the question inevitably comes up: for how long? How many more months or years was the U.S. supposed to wait? At what point should U.S. policy-makers have finally said, “Enough, we’ve waited as long as we can?” Precedent would suggest that the question would never be asked. It wasn’t long ago when President Barack Obama wanted to pull the U.S. out of Afghanistan, only to wind up vacating the Oval Office leaving the job undone.

Nor would extending the U.S. stay in Afghanistan be without extreme complications. The insurgency simply wasn’t going to tolerate anything other than a full U.S. exit. Taliban officials made it clear that a U.S. presence past Biden’s September 11 deadline would be viewed as an abrogation of the 2020 Doha accord, increasing the likelihood of a resumption of widespread attacks against U.S. forces. Any American casualties would require Biden to increase the U.S. troop level for force-protection purposes, creating additional targets for the Taliban. All of a sudden, the U.S. military would have been, once again, fighting a war it simply couldn’t win.

Say what you want about how the Biden administration planned the evacuation of Kabul. Reasonable people can disagree with how it was conducted. What isn’t reasonable, however, is believing more of the same would have achieved different results.