As the first anniversary of the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan is upon us, I’d been meaning to write a post about it. People much better informed than I have done so in recent days, so I am mostly going to quote them.
I’ll start by saying that I supported the withdrawal last year and I still do. I believe our global military presence, on balance, does more harm than good, both to the world, and at home. I’ll say more about that in a moment. But it’s also true that the withdrawal from Afghanistan represents difficult and, in some ways, insoluble tradeoffs.
Rebecca Blumenstein, one of the top ranking editors at the New York Times, played a heroic role last year in helping dozens of Afghanis who had worked for the Times in Afganistan and had to be evacuated as the country was falling to the Taliban. Yesterday, Blumenstein wrote a powerful account of the challenges for those evacuees of resettling in the United States.
One of the greatest legacies of the American occupation of Afghanistan was expanded access to education for women and girls. Those gains were hard fought, especially as some family members resisted and the war interrupted their studies. But Marwa, her sisters and countless other Afghan women became or trained to be doctors, lawyers, ministers and journalists. The sudden evacuation upended it all.
The consequences for girls and women of the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban have been disastrous. And not only for them, of course. It’s a brutally repressive, thuggish regime.
But that fact alone doesn’t resolve the question of whether the withdrawal was defensible.
Here’s Peter Beinart, one of the most incisive analysts of American foreign policy, in his newsletter today:
As we approach the first anniversary of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, it’s worth distinguishing two different questions. The first is about the wisdom of America’s exit. Did the Biden administration leave at the right time and in the right way? That’s open to debate. The second is about the wisdom of America’s entry. Was the Bush administration right to invade and occupy Afghanistan in the first place? That answer is much clearer: No. The decision proved to be an utter disaster. According to Brown University’s Cost of War Project, the war cost the US roughly $115 billion per year for twenty years. For that amount, according to a study by the Brookings Institution, the US could have come to close eliminating child poverty. And the cost wasn’t just financial. The Afghan war killed more than two thousand Americans and seventy thousand Afghans and Pakistanis, and left Afghanistan itself in ruin.
It’s worth pointing out that the disasters of the two decades of US occupation didn’t occur in a vacuum. To put this in simple terms, it’s not like life would have been great for most folks in Afghanistan absent the American occupation. There is also always the question of how to figure in sunk costs. Even if you believed, in 2021, that the US presence for twenty years had been, on balance, a mistake for the reasons Beinart enumerated, you could still come to a different conclusion than Beinart. We’re not getting back the two trillion dollars we’ve spent up to now, you might argue. So the question then becomes how we think about projecting tradeoffs into the future, including the profound benefits of preserving the positive developments of the past two decades.
Additionally, unlike other recent American interventions, there is a reasonable case that the initial invasion was justified.
The Duke scholar David Schanzer wrote today that:
To start off, I do not believe that military intervention in Afghanistan was unjustified or immoral. It was a just war. Al Qaeda had used its safe-haven in Afghanistan to launch a vicious attack on innocent American civilians. The Taliban was given a chance to turn over the perpetrators of this attack but refused. The United States had a right under the U.N. Charter to defend itself against future attacks by using military force against both al Qaeda and the Taliban government that was harboring the group.
I didn’t write out the above as a straw man that I am now going to beat into smithereens. As I said, there are complicated tradeoffs here. But my bias is strongly against American military interventions generally. Because of that, when President Biden stood against the very powerful gravitational pull across our political establishment in favor of the perpetuation of America’s pervasive global military presence, I stood with him (which I know was of great comfort to him).
For many years now, the former military officer and historian Andrew Bacevich has laid out clearly the costs of what he calls American militarism. Baecvich isn’t a pacifist. But he does not give the benefit of the doubt to our political leaders when they contemplate a new intervention. Quite simply, their longstanding track record does not warrant it. Writing in The Nation this spring, Bacevich recalled Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech in 1967 at the Riverside Church in New York City, condemning the Vietnam War. King, like war critics in general in the United States when a war is still going on, was pilloried both by conservatives and establishment liberals for his stance on Vietnam. It was one thing for King to tout equal rights for all Americans consistent with what he deemed our highest ideals. It was something else altogether for King to fail to stay in his lane and to attack what he described as the triple pathologies of racism, materialism and militarism.
Evoking King’s critique, Bacevich writes:
Speaking in a prophetic register in his address, King had described the Vietnam War as “but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” And although that war ended half a century ago, the deeper malady still persists. It can be seen in the widespread inequality and crippling poverty that pervade what is still the world’s richest nation, as well as in our country’s continuing appetite for war, whether waged directly or through proxies. Above all, we see it in a stubborn refusal to recognize the kinship of lingering racism, ubiquitous materialism, and corrosive militarism, each drawing on and sustaining the others.
At Riverside Church, King charged that while the US government might profess a principled commitment to peace, it had become “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” Given the crescendo of death and destruction still building in Vietnam, the truth of that statement in 1967 was—or ought to have been—indisputable. Even taking into account the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing destruction and slaughter there, it still remains true today. Tally up the consequences of the various misbegotten post-9/11 campaigns undertaken pursuant to the “Global War on Terror” and the facts speak for themselves.
Beinart is also not a pacifist. He says US intervention may well be warranted in cases like the following:
I’m not suggesting the US should never resist armies powered by nationalism [like those of the Taliban]. When one nation’s toxic nationalism bursts its borders and becomes imperialism aimed at its neighbors, it may pose a genuine threat. In such cases—think of Nazi Germany’s invasion of France or Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine—the US will find motivated allies in the countries under attack. But it’s crucial to distinguish battles against foreign imperialism from battles against nationalist movements that, however loathsome, are operating on their home turf.
One problem is that America’s leaders, when justifying overseas incursions, almost always frame them not only as necessary to stop brutality within the borders of a country. Instead, our leaders invariably also insist that if the thuggish regime we’re opposing isn’t stopped, they’ll wreak havoc on their neighbors. Almost whenever American foreign policy elites make those arguments about a regime that hasn’t actually committed aggression beyond its own borders, you should grab for your wallet.1 Iraq and Libya are two particularly egregious examples of this framing.
When I refer to foreign policy elites, I mean, generally, those officeholders, elected and appointed, responsible for crafting our foreign policy, as well as influential voices in our debates about foreign policy, including elite pundits and retired policymakers, such as former secretaries of state and ambassadors. In speaking of a consensus, I don’t mean that every single person in a position of influence on foreign policy matters thinks the same way. But as I’ve said, there is an overwhelming gravitational pull among the aforementioned elites in favor of the proposition that the United States is, on balance, a force for good in the world and that we have a responsibility to use our moral and material resources to shape global affairs.
Joe Biden is not a dissident from that consensus. Indeed, he’s essentially a lifer in the elite stratum I’m describing. But as Schanzer pointed out, Vice President Biden opposed President Obama’s surge in Afghanistan. And his determination as President to withdraw in 2021 proceeded in spite of the fact that he knew he would be blamed for the Taliban’s subsequent takeover. That takeover, Schanzer explains, was inevitable once the Trump administration made the deal it did with the Taliban in 2020 to reduce our force size. Trump wanted to leave, but also wanted to delay a Taliban takeover until after the 2020 presidential election. Biden, in other words, acted resolutely in the face of a consensus with which he was intimately familiar, had long been committed to and in spite of the intense blowback he knew he’d get both because of that consensus and because of the situation left to him by Trump.
In sum, by 2020, there was nothing the United States could do to stop Afghanistan from falling to the Taliban, short of a re-escalation that there would have been no political will to support. Biden was willing to remove the final troops from the fig leaf presence that could no longer stop the Taliban tide. In doing so, he put his foot down, at least in this instance, against the premise of so much of our foreign policy discourse - that, however badly we’ve screwed up, over however long a period of time, *now* is never the right time to admit our mistakes and go home.
I can’t claim perfect consistency on this issue, by the way. On the fraught question of humanitarian intervention, though I’m generally opposed on the grounds, in part, that we’ll likely end up making things worse, I wanted the US and UN to intervene in Rwanda in 1994. Of course, in that case, we didn’t.
Because I teach a graduate-level course on international conflict, I have grappled with the question of initiating wars for a long time. I also have to think about my 9th grade history teacher, a Vietnam War draft dodger (he used his white privilege to get a doctor's note) who said wars always create more problems than they solve. Indeed, there is never a good time to call it quits and go home. The only way to avoid that is to never initiate a war. The whole goal of deterrence, which is wildly misunderstood, is the exploitation of potential force, not the efficient application of force. As painful as it is to watch, I don't think the West would have sympathized with Ukraine had it attacked Russia first in a "preemptive" war. And when Russia would have pummeled the Ukrainians in response and marched toward Kyiv, the West would not have come to Ukraine's rescue. The only justifiable war is a truly defensive war in which the other side has violated your sovereignty. Now if we take the case of Afghanistan, there may have been justification because Al Qaeda had attacked the US and Afghanistan was harboring it. But the time to have pulled out would have been the day after the Taliban fell. Arrange for UN Peacekeepers, if necessary, but otherwise get out and only come back if you're invited. It's not only the more moral foreign policy, it is also the least destructive.
Really enjoyed your curation of these thoughtful takes along with your own thoughts.