The Afghanistan Withdrawal Can’t Be Whatever You Want It To Be
Both parties have constructed their own interpretations of how the war ended. Neither version is accurate.
One of the least talked about elements of the longest war in American history is that its conclusion has been co-opted by partisan opportunists at both ends of the political spectrum.
If what you need is a president who agonized over whether to continue the war and ultimately chose not to, you’ll find what you need amidst the sea of misleading headlines published during the spring and summer of 2021. If what you’re looking for instead is a president who abandoned a worthwhile mission and endangered American security, there’s a version of the US military’s exit from Kabul that can accommodate that talking point as well.
Neither side is correct but neither side seems to care. How our final months in Afghanistan actually unfolded doesn’t appear to be nearly as important as the political plot lines those last days have produced. It was inevitable that this issue would reemerge at election time. Now that that’s happened, it is useful to recall the complete timeline of how the war actually ended.
A good place to begin is the Doha agreement, a February 2020 deal between the US and the Taliban laying out a timetable for the US to remove all of its troops from Afghanistan over the next year.
Many on the right like to give President Trump credit for “trying” to end the war but this is a shockingly low bar for the commander-in-chief. As the leader of the United States military, he had the ability to remove all US forces at any time, and he simply chose not to. The same president who’d once warned us of the ills of setting arbitrary timetables had decided on 14 months. The same administration who never wanted to telegraph to the Taliban how long it would take to wait us out, had asked them to wait until the following spring.
The following May – the deadline for the US to follow through on its end of the deal – was little more than a post-election mirage because nobody knows what Trump would’ve chosen to do had he been reelected. Every day for four years he awoke with the unilateral power to end the war and every one of those days ended without that happening. Taking a habitual liar like Donald Trump at his word on anything is a risk. This is especially true when it comes to foreign policy, which is something the US government is rarely, if ever, completely honest about.
As this publication emphasized when this deal was signed, there was a strong possibility that President Trump would’ve reneged on his promise and kept troops in Afghanistan if the voters had given him a second term. Since leaving office, Trump has repeatedly stated that this is exactly what he would’ve done.
During a November 2021 interview with Fox News propagandist Mark Levin, Trump said that he was going to “leave” Afghanistan but “was going to keep Bagram,” referencing the airfield in the country’s northeastern Parwan Province. It was at one time the largest US military base in Afghanistan.
Nearly a year later, he reiterated this point to India’s NDTV.
Four months later, during a campaign stop to announce his South Carolina leadership team, Trump once again lamented leaving Bagram.
During an appearance on The Will Cain Show in June of this year, Trump doubled down once more, stating:
“We were going to leave, but we were going to keep Bagram, which is one of the biggest air bases in the world, costs us billions and billions of dollars to build many years ago, but we were going to leave because of China. Because it’s one hour away from where China makes it… Forget about Afghanistan. It’s exactly right next to China. It’s exactly one hour away from where they make their nuclear weapons. Isn’t that a great thing? Now we’re going to keep it, going to leave 4,000 people and keep it and keep it strong.”
As it turns out, not only was the former president not going to leave Afghanistan, but he was also going to increase the number of troops stationed in the country.
It’s also worth noting that Trump’s repeated declarations that he would’ve continued the occupation are tied to Afghanistan’s close proximity to China, and not fighting terrorism as the US government spent years insisting. This is consistent with statements made by countless Republican and Democratic lawmakers throughout 2020 and 2021. As the probability of a complete withdrawal grew, the mask came off and Washington became more and more comfortable admitting that our continued presence in Afghanistan had absolutely nothing to do with protecting the homeland.
The US military spent 20 years setting withdrawal timelines from Afghanistan and then blowing through them. The Doha agreement would’ve easily allowed a second Trump administration to do the same. Anyone doubting this possibility should look no further than the deal’s very first stipulation, which states that the road to peace depends on “guarantees and enforcement mechanisms that will prevent the use of the soil of Afghanistan by any group or individual against the security of the United States and its allies.”
Throughout the so-called War on Terror, everything and anything the White House felt like doing overseas was encased in vague threats and generic dangers. If Trump had decided to tell the American public that the risk of an attack on the US emanating from Afghanistan remained, he wouldn’t have needed anything substantive to make his case, and he could’ve done so with or without the US military’s July 2022 Kabul assassination of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.
This is all context Republican praise for Trump’s contribution to ending the war conveniently ignores. Democrats are just as selective when it comes to describing President Biden’s role in pulling out of Afghanistan. The narrative sculpted by DNC strategists maintains that the last American soldier left Afghan soil because Joe Biden made the courageous decision to end the war. No different than the “anti-war” story spun by the right, this tale is also mostly fiction.
In remarks delivered in the Treaty Room of the White House on April 14, 2021, President Biden announced his intention to end the war in Afghanistan and that it was “time for American troops to come home.” Planted in that same speech, however, was an indication that this likely wouldn’t turn out to be true.
During the speech, Biden stated that “while we will not stay involved in Afghanistan militarily, our diplomatic and humanitarian work will continue.” He continued by noting that “over the next few months, we will also determine what a continued U.S. diplomatic presence in Afghanistan will look like, including how we’ll ensure the security of our diplomats.” Naturally, the only way to ensure their safety was for the president to reverse a policy decision that he’d just told the American public was absolute. Two months later, the Biden administration announced that these diplomats would be protected by the approximately 650 US troops that would remain in Afghanistan following the US military’s “withdrawal”. According to a report by the Associated Press, an additional several hundred would remain at the Kabul airport in an effort to assist Turkish soldiers providing security there. These additional forces would likely remain in the country until September.
A much simpler description of the path Biden had decided on was that the US government’s 2,500-troop footprint would shrink to somewhere around 1,000 American soldiers. It’s not clear why this very real and very crucial part of the Afghanistan War’s timeline has been memory holed by virtually every politician and journalist in the country.
“After consulting closely with our allies and partners, with our military leaders and intelligence personnel, with our diplomats and our development experts,” as he noted during that April 2021 speech, Joe Biden had decided that the most effective way to end the war in Afghanistan would be to ensure that it would continue. After all, the Taliban repeatedly stated in no uncertain terms that its forces would resume attacks against American troops if the US military did not follow through with a complete withdrawal.
Biden’s “withdrawal” was a shameless bait and switch and a recipe for disaster. An honest assessment of what actually transpired during Biden’s first few months in office reveals a deceptive, transparently artificial departure by a president who wanted to keep the US military involved in Afghanistan about as badly as Trump did.
That summer, it was revealed that the US was planning to begin negotiations with neighboring countries such as Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan in the hopes of being able to set up bases from which to continue surveillance, reconnaissance, and drone strikes after the US completed what would’ve essentially been merely a troop reduction.
After the Taliban marched through the country in less than two weeks, the president swiftly realized just how many troops maintaining a US presence in Afghanistan would require – following the end of the war Chairman on the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley testified before Congress that holding Kabul alone would require at least 25,000 troops – and abandoned the idea of leaving behind a residual force. The talks to establish US bases right at Afghanistan’s doorstep also never materialized.
Plainly put, Biden had essentially planned to continue the US occupation, watched his military get thrown out of the country, and received credit for ending the war anyway. This is a timeline most Democrats and Republicans refuse to acknowledge, opting instead for sloppy revisionism for an event that occurred just three years ago. Many on the left cling to this version because it facilitates narratives the party finds attractive.
Although they prefer to sell their constituents a slightly different version, many on the right do the same.
Republican lawmakers quickly decided that the August 26 airport bombing that summer in Kabul that killed 13 US service members should be deemed one of the most consequential events in American history.
The needless, senseless death of more than a dozen soldiers is without a doubt an absolutely horrific tragedy. But the death of the more than 2,000 American soldiers who died before them in Afghanistan has never elicited the same outrage and urgency from the Republican party.
Seventeen American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan throughout 2017, Trump’s first year in office. Fifteen US troops lost their lives in this war during his second year, along with 22 others during the year that followed, and 10 more during the year immediately preceding Biden. Not only did Republican lawmakers largely ignore those deaths, but their desire to prolong the occupation indefinitely would have all but guaranteed that many more Americans would’ve been killed as well.
The end of the war in Afghanistan has produced an inordinate amount of finger-pointing and chest-thumping, but a lot of the rhetoric simply isn’t true.
As we get deeper into election season, voters need to remember that both parties were responsible for the mess in Afghanistan, and both parties – regardless of what they say now – tried to keep that war going.