Last November, I asked Kori Schake, a veteran of Bush’s Pentagon and National Security Council, what to make of Trump’s post-election push to withdraw the troops before the end of his term, a desire that seemed to influence his decision to fire his Defense Secretary, Mark Esper. In the end, though, Biden’s call was not surprising. troop exit by May 1st of this year, in effect kicking it to his successor to ratify or reject the decision. In February, 2020, the Trump Administration signed a deal with the Taliban that pledged a U.S. Progressive Democrats, on the left, and Trumpian America Firsters, on the right, were more supportive, but Jack Reed, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, spoke for many-from both parties-in Washington’s national-security establishment when he called Biden’s decision a “tough call on what may be the least of many bad options.” The tepid support also surely reflected the fact that Biden’s decision went against the Washington consensus, which had continued, more or less, since the later Bush years and through the, Obama and Trump Presidencies. McConnell, with what seemed like an unusually high quotient of political chutzpah, called “precipitously withdrawing” American forces from Afghanistan “a grave mistake.” Whatever you think of Biden’s decision, after twenty years, it is certainly not precipitous. presence there, despite the former President’s repeatedly stated intention to get out. For the past four years, they had invoked those same scary scenarios in seeking to persuade Donald Trump to keep a U.S. departure, in 2011-when the Islamic State swept across a large swath of both Iraq and Syria and nearly rode into Baghdad itself-these are not abstract fears.Īs soon as Biden’s decision was announced, both Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Republican senator Lindsey Graham, and also a few Democrats, criticized the move. military can help it.) Will Afghanistan fall victim to the bad- or worst-case scenarios that experts have been warning about for all these years, from a renewed Taliban dictatorship, to vicious factional street fighting in Kabul, to human-rights catastrophes for Afghanistan’s women and girls? Will international jihadists use the country once again as a base for planning terrorist attacks? To anyone who remembers what happened in Iraq after the U.S. Many questions remain, of course: Will there be an iconic, helicopter-out-of-Saigon moment? (Answer: Not if the U.S. And, as Biden pointed out, it could never, in recent years, provide a plausible explanation of what achieving its goals would look like. America did not lose the war-not exactly-but it did not win, either. But no amount of clear-eyed argument from Biden could erase the embarrassing historical fact that Afghanistan has now banished another superpower. had long since accomplished its original objectives of neutralizing the Al Qaeda threat from Afghan territory and bringing justice to the 9/11 perpetrator Osama bin Laden. On Wednesday, he made the case that the U.S. “One more year? Two more years? Ten more years?” he asked. “So when will it be the right moment to leave?” he said, pointedly summarizing the arguments that he had dismissed. The President seemed genuinely sick and tired of the endless pleas for just a little more time. “War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multigenerational undertaking,” he said. military personnel who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq over the two decades, including his late son Beau. I guess this is how eras end: not with a culminating battle or some movie-thriller crescendo but with a Tuesday-morning leak to the Washington Post and, a day later, a fifteen-minute Presidential speech confirming the historic decision.īiden pulled the plug in an unsentimental, sober address, with the only passionate notes reserved for the U.S. It’s finally, really, for-better-or-worse over. Bush had declared the start of the fight, to root out Al Qaeda and its Taliban enablers, Biden declared that there would be no more extensions of the American military presence, rebuffing pleas of the teetering, pro-Western Afghan government and his own generals. Speaking from the White House Treaty Room, where George W. “It’s time to end the Forever War,” he said, in a speech that was both deeply personal and politically emphatic. military a deadline of the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks to withdraw all remaining troops. On Wednesday, Joe Biden announced the close of the two-decade-long American war in Afghanistan, giving the U.S.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |