Long overdue: Biden was right to pull US troops out of Afghanistan

Abstract

Both former President Donald Trump and current U.S. President Joseph Biden were right to command the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. On August 15, the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul, was left in chaos. The world was shocked as revitalized Taliban soldiers overran Afghan security forces and subsequently captured the presidential palace. From Washington to Brussels, governments struggled to make sense of the events unfolding in Afghanistan. After all, just more than a month earlier, on July 8, U.S. President Joe Biden insisted that the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was not inevitable. The assumption then was that the Afghan government and its military leadership had the capacity and the will to hold off the advancing Taliban forces. As has become subsequently clear, the U.S. policy underestimated the impact of corruption in the country, overestimated the Afghan military’s ability to defend the country. Leadership misjudged the Taliban’s ability to win back the hearts and minds of its people in the countryside and to successfully recruit enough young men to sustain the fight against U.S. forces. The questions everyone is now asking are: What went wrong? Was America’s longest war justified? Was the withdrawal warranted, despite the manner in which it was executed? Did America achieve any of its objectives in Afghanistan? Will Afghanistan, under Taliban rule, allow al Qaeda and other extremist groups to use the country – a crossroads of Central and South Asia – as a base for international terrorist attacks?