To learn the right lessons for future foreign policy and military decisions, we must reanalyze not just what the United States did wrong in how it left Afghanistan, but also what was wrong in deciding to leave at all.
The decision to leave Afghanistan was made, ham-handedly and tragically, by former President Donald Trump and confirmed with feckless and even more tragic operational follow-up by President Joe Biden. Every sentient person should be unendingly furious at Biden, his Cabinet, and the top generals who completed the retreat and defeat without rescuing all Americans who wanted to leave and while Biden failed to honor a law requiring him to report to Congress in advance of his withdrawal plans. The behavior of Biden and his team is a monumental disgrace, the worst diplomatic/military conduct of my lifetime and perhaps in all of U.S. history. Mass resignations are in order, but apparently, these people have little sense of honor.
But everybody seems to just blow by the question of whether the U.S. should have withdrawn from Afghanistan at all. I already have argued that we should have remained. On Monday, a thoughtful reader named Gary Lester put the issue in sharper perspective.
“Another way of considering the question of our involvement there,” he wrote me. “If there had been no ‘war’ there 2001-2020 and the U.S.A. were offered the opportunity to take control of Bagram AFB, wouldn’t we jump on that as a chance to establish a viable, defensible base in a forward position vis a vis both Russia and China? Irregardless of the war in Afghanistan itself, didn’t that base offer us major strategic advantages in that part of the world? For the life of me, I don’t understand why we would give up that toehold.”
Lester is correct. Americans wailed so much about a “20-year war” (which for at least the past seven or eight years wasn’t really a war at all) that they didn’t look at the situation anew in terms of its strategic advantages compared to costs. Demagogic elected officials in three administrations exacerbated that mistaken outlook, rather than even trying to explain what our mission there actually had become. It was not a war and not a massive effort at nation-building, but rather a strategic forward deployment and an effective prophylactic operation against terrorist networks.
So, if we were starting anew this year, with no presence in Afghanistan before, we would have been told that these would be our costs: less than 10,000 permanent troops, sometimes as low as 2,500. A likelihood of 10 or fewer mission-based deaths per year. The costs of maintaining an air base and an intelligence apparatus. Several billion dollars a year in military aid and several billion more in civic society aid for an honestly elected but weak and somewhat operationally corrupt government. Humanitarian aid that would increase the life expectancy in that country by some 50% while allowing girls to be educated for the first time in decades. And considerable diplomatic efforts to justify our presence.
In return, the benefits to us would include a powerful and pristine air base, strategically of great value, as described by Lester. A base of operations for supremely effective intelligence against terrorist networks. A denial of any safe and stable base of operations from which international terrorist networks could plot and carry out horrific acts such as the 9/11 airplane attacks. A denial of a lifetime of forcible rape against millions of Afghan girls and women. And more.
The choice should be obvious. The benefits substantially outweigh the costs. Trump and Biden gave all those benefits away. In doing so, they put America last.
