The Flawed Reasoning Behind Biden’s Afghanistan Withdrawal

On Wednesday, President Biden announced that all U.S. and NATO forces will be withdrawn from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021. Biden’s speech was emotional. He recalled the toll taken on American troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan, explaining that he carries around a card with the precise number of soldiers killed in both wars. To date, Biden said, 2,448 American soldiers and personnel have been killed during the war in Afghanistan, while more than 20,000 others have been wounded. Biden reminded viewers that his late son, Beau, was deployed to Iraq, making him the only commander-in-chief in recent memory to have a child serve in a war zone. The president also noted how much the world has changed since 2001. America needs to “fight the battles for the next 20 years, not the last 20,” Biden said. He cited the many new challenges we collectively face, from the coronavirus pandemic, to cyber threats, to revanchist powers such as China and Russia. 

These arguments have much merit and likely resonated with many Americans. 

At other points, however, President Biden stumbled—both rhetorically and in terms of his reasoning. He confused Iraq and Afghanistan more than once, both in his speech and during a poignant visit to Arlington National Cemetery immediately after. 

Oddly, Biden indirectly critiqued his friend, President Barack Obama, with whom he served for two terms. He argued that the U.S. should have left Afghanistan immediately after killing Osama bin Laden. “That was 10 years ago, think about that,” Biden said. “We delivered justice to bin Laden a decade ago, and we’ve stayed in Afghanistan for a decade since.” More than half of those years came during Biden’s time as Obama’s vice president. 

President Biden had his own Mission Accomplished moment. “I believed that our presence in Afghanistan should be focused on the reason we went in the first place, to ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base from which to attack our homeland again,” Biden said. “We did that. We accomplished that objective.” Biden cited the death of bin Laden as the true end point for the conflict.  

Listening to President Biden speak, Americans might think that the terrorist threat was entirely eliminated with bin Laden’s demise in May 2011, that the al-Qaeda founder was all that really mattered. This is obviously wrong.

The U.S. intelligence community and military hunted down dozens of senior al-Qaeda figures in South Asia both before and after the raid on bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan. President Obama authorized a drone campaign that specifically targeted bin Laden’s henchmen and their allies in northern Pakistan. Some of them were killed in the months and years after bin Laden’s death, as the U.S. leveraged intelligence, including the files recovered in the Abbottabad compound, to map out al-Qaeda’s network. The purpose of this campaign was to weaken al-Qaeda and mitigate a stream of threats to Americans around the world. The U.S. and its partners in the region have continued to target senior and midlevel al-Qaeda operatives to this day—mainly in Afghanistan. Some of bin Laden’s original companions, including al-Qaeda’s current emir Ayman al-Zawahiri, continued to carry the banner forward years after Osama’s demise. 

Biden’s repeated references to the bin Laden raid reveal another flaw in his thinking. The president believes America can manage terrorism emanating from the region without maintaining a footprint in Afghanistan. This is called the “over the horizon” model, a term Biden used to describe striking targets from afar. But the operation that netted bin Laden is a good example of why this won’t work. The elite Navy SEALs who killed bin Laden in Pakistan were deployed via helicopters—from Afghanistan. It is difficult, if not impossible, to see how the U.S. could have conducted that raid otherwise. And Biden’s strategy will make it only more difficult to launch special operations raids behind enemy lines in the future. 

There is another problem with Biden’s “over the horizon” model. The U.S. military presence enables an intelligence network that is essential for locating and neutralizing terrorists. But the CIA’s counterterrorism spy network is going to wither post-withdrawal. Biden’s own CIA director, William Burns, made this very point while testifying in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee shortly before the president’s announcement. “When the time comes for the U.S. military to withdraw, the U.S. government’s ability to collect and act on threats will diminish. That’s simply a fact,” Burns said. He’s right. 

There is also a basic contradiction in Biden’s reasoning. “We’ll hold the Taliban accountable for its commitment not to allow any terrorist to threaten the United States or its allies from Afghan soil,” the president said. But if the main objective was already “accomplished,” as the president claims, and the threat to the U.S. homeland was eliminated, then why would the Taliban’s supposed counterterrorism assurance even matter? Why should the U.S. even attempt to “hold the Taliban accountable” in this regard?

This contradiction is exacerbated by the facts. The Taliban’s supposed counterterrorism assurances were at the heart of the February 29, 2020, deal negotiated by the Trump administration. According to the State Department, the Taliban was supposed to end its decades-long relationship with al-Qaeda, preventing the group from operating on Afghan soil. As I’ve written at length previously, there is no evidence indicating that the Taliban has broken with al-Qaeda. There is much evidence showing that the two remained intertwined, fighting against their common Afghan enemies to this day. Their alliance is unbroken. 

President Biden explained that while he may not have agreed to the February 29, 2020, withdrawal deal, “it was an agreement made by the United States government, and that means something.” He explained that he is beginning the withdrawal “in keeping with that agreement and with our national interests.” But the Trump-Taliban deal isn’t worth the paper it is written on. Not only has the Taliban failed to live up to its counterterrorism assurances, the group has done nothing to advance the cause of peace. Instead, the Taliban went on the offensive against Afghan forces immediately after it was signed, rejecting multiple requests for a prolonged ceasefire. It would have been more reasonable for Biden to say that although he is withdrawing America’s forces, the U.S. doesn’t consider the Taliban a counterterrorism partner and reserves the right to defend itself. 

Biden openly questioned whether America should even support the Afghan government, which was established by the U.S. and an international coalition of nations following the Taliban’s ouster in late 2001. He recalled how a visit to the Kunar Valley in 2008 “reinforced” his “conviction that only the Afghans have the right and responsibility to lead their country.” He added that “more and endless American military force could not create or sustain a durable Afghan government.” But the U.S. military has sustained the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) to this point, even while greatly reducing America’s footprint and the costs associated with it. It has long been the case that the Afghans suffer the lion’s share of casualties trying to stop the jihadists’ advances. While the U.S. hasn’t suffered any combat deaths in more than one year, thousands of Afghan personnel have died fighting against the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and ISIS. Biden claimed that the U.S. “will keep providing assistance” to the ANDSF, but didn’t explain what that will really entail. 

The continued existence of the Afghan government after America’s withdrawal is very much in doubt. It is easy to see how the Taliban and al-Qaeda will gain ground quickly in some areas, likely seizing several provincial capitals that had remained out of their clutches the past two decades. Kabul, the Afghan capital, is already rocked by terror attacks on a regular basis. The pace of those operations will increase in the coming months. But for the president, this is no longer America’s concern. 

Biden claimed that “our reasons for remaining in Afghanistan have become increasingly unclear, even as the terrorist threat that we went to fight evolved.” He continued: “Over the past 20 years, the threat has become more dispersed, metastasizing around the globe—Al-Shabaab in Somalia, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Al-Nusra in Syria, ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates in multiple countries in Africa and Asia.”

Even in this brief synopsis, Biden stumbled. There hasn’t been a group known as “Al-Nusra” in Syria since mid-2016, when it began a rebranding process that has greatly confused the picture. 

There are also broader problems with the point the president was trying to make. Biden argued that with the jihadis fighting in so many countries today, the U.S. cannot afford to have “thousands” of troops in Afghanistan. Although domestically unpopular, the several thousand troops who are currently in Afghanistan represent a sustainable force posture, from the perspective of resource allocation. Long gone are the days of massive counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, as only several thousand U.S. personnel are deployed across those two countries. The U.S. simply does not have large-scale forces deployed to any of the theaters where the jihadis are fighting.  

The additional implication of Biden’s argument is that it does not matter if the jihadists win in Afghanistan. If he and his advisers do indeed think this is the case, then they are wrong—very wrong. 

Al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia that Biden mentioned, has sworn its allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri and, through him, to the emir of the Taliban, Haibatullah Akhunzada. AQAP, also mentioned by Biden, is led by Khalid Batarfi, a veteran of the jihad in Afghanistan who has been featured in Taliban propaganda and also recognizes Akhundzada as the new “Emir of the Faithful”—a title usually reserved for a Muslim caliph. While there is no longer an “Al-Nusra” in Syria, other al-Qaeda organizations continue to operate there, including one known as the “Guardians of Religion.” That group is headed by Abu Humam al-Shami, another Afghan jihad veteran who trained al-Qaeda recruits to fight for the Taliban prior to 9/11.   

Tens of thousands of jihadists around the globe are poised to celebrate America’s defeat in Afghanistan. Their movement was given a large boost by the defeat of the Soviets a generation ago. Now, America’s defeat will be commemorated on September 11, 2021—the end date chosen by President Biden. It was a tone-deaf decision to select the 9/11 anniversary. Any other date would have been better. It means the jihadis can now remember how al-Qaeda brought the war to America on that date, and America completed its retreat from Afghanistan exactly 20 years later.    

This isn’t to say that Biden is all wrong. He rightly pointed out the absurdity of having young Americans going off to fight in a war that began before they were even born. It’s understandable that he doesn’t want any more Americans to die there while he is commander in chief. But there is another side to the story.

President Biden argued that the war in Afghanistan “was never meant to be a multigenerational undertaking.”  

That’s true from an American perspective. 

But it was never true from the jihadists’ perspective. While America’s role in this “forever” war may be coming to a close, the endless jihad continues.