The Afghanistan top line: It was time to go

Because the decision to leave Afghanistan is just as solidly grounded today as it was years ago. It should have been evident years ago that the United States could neither win the Afghan civil war nor transform Afghanistan into a Western-style, centralized democracy. President Joe Biden was faced with two options. He could do what his predecessors should have done and break the sunk-cost fallacy that helped bottle U.S. troops into a two-decade conflict. Or conversely, he could continue the status quo in pursuit of what could be charitably described as a highly expensive, strategically exhausting stalemate.

Longtime opponents of withdrawal are using images of the Taliban sitting comfortably in the Afghan presidential palace to reinforce their argument in favor of continuing to throw resources into a failed enterprise. Yet, their case is entirely dependent on striking an emotional chord — and emotion isn’t a sound basis for making public policy.

As Biden himself acknowledged, withdrawing from the longest war in U.S. history has proven messier than even he anticipated. But keeping U.S. forces in Afghanistan in the hope of accomplishing impossible objectives would have been even messier.

Reversing the withdrawal, for instance, would have done nothing whatsoever to change Afghanistan’s situation over the long term. Keeping U.S. forces in the country would have had, at best, a short-term, tactical effect on the war’s outcome. If 20 years of commitment and over $2 trillion in investment (not to mention the 2,400 U.S. troops who lost their lives and the 20,000 who were injured during that time) wasn’t enough to turn the Afghan army into a viable, relatively self-sufficient fighting force, it’s highly unlikely another one, two, or five years would have done the trick either.

While many Afghan soldiers have fought bravely, the Afghan security forces at large were an institutional mess. Conventional units were almost entirely dependent on U.S. air support, which meant that Washington would have had to fly sorties day after day, year after year, just for Kabul to have a chance at holding the terrain it had. The U.S. Air Force would, in effect, be serving as an auxiliary of the Afghan armed forces in perpetuity, further deepening U.S. involvement in a civil war it had no capacity to resolve.

In addition, while U.S. firepower could kill a lot of Taliban fighters, it couldn’t compensate for the rotten core of the Afghan state. The Taliban’s rapid territorial advance was as much about their ability to navigate Afghan tribal dynamics as it was about the comprehensive, systemic weaknesses of the Afghan government. After years of being thrown into isolated outposts in hostile territory with little support from their own senior commanders, Afghan soldiers were simply unwilling to risk their lives for a terrible system that couldn’t even pay them on time (or at all). Rather than fight for a corrupted, detached political elite in Kabul hundreds of miles away, many decided to negotiate their own surrenders to save their own skins. You can’t blame Afghan troops on the front lines for preferring to live out the rest of their lives instead of sacrificing them for a group of ungrateful, unaccountable politicians.

Finally, one can’t end this discussion without mentioning the February 2020 Doha agreement signed between the Trump administration and the Taliban. The accord committed the U.S. to a total troop departure by May 1, 2021, in exchange for a Taliban suspension of fire on U.S. and coalition forces. Biden pushed the timetable to September but largely stuck with the agreement. Regardless of what one thinks about how the agreement was negotiated, it nevertheless succeeded in cutting U.S. troop fatalities to zero.

Had Biden violated the agreement’s timetables by extending the U.S. troop presence for an undefined period, the streak would have evaporated. U.S. casualties would have inevitably increased as the Taliban resumed firing on U.S. positions, which in turn would force Washington to send in an infusion of even more U.S. troops. Biden quite rightly didn’t want to risk the resumption of a shooting war, particularly when Kabul itself was both unwilling and unable to reform.

We shouldn’t let the nuts-and-bolts of the U.S. withdrawal obscure the bigger part of the story: As soon as Washington committed itself to constructing and defending an Afghan state from the ground up, it set itself up for failure.

Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.