Trump deal pulls troops from Afghanistan too slowly, not too fast

The U.S. accord with the Taliban is undoubtedly imperfect, but making American military withdrawal from Afghanistan too easy is not its flaw. Yet that is exactly the foolish critique leveled by hawkish members of Congress who seem content to stay at war in Afghanistan forever.

The conditions outlined in two classified annexes accompanying the agreement, brief lists of prohibited behavior for each side and the terms under which the U.S. military will depart, are too vague, lawmakers such as Rep. Liz Cheney and Sen. Chris Murphy have complained. The annexes don’t give a specific metric for success, they claim, and how can the United States end this war without knowing we’ve succeeded?