Obsessed with Ending a War, Biden Couldn’t See the Value of His Troops

Countless op-eds and commentaries are being written about the need to investigate and fully understand the disastrous execution of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. With many thousands of Americans and allied workers still stranded in Kabul with no safe way of getting to the airport, and the violence we’re already seeing from the Taliban, I’m glad there’s a call to get to the bottom of the fiasco.

But as we do, I’d like to advance one factor: the perception and role of army troops.

President Joe Biden, in his obsession with “ending the war” in Afghanistan, never went beyond “getting our troops out.” He perhaps forgot that ending a war involves a lot more than withdrawing troops. For one thing, you need these troops to evacuate civilians.

Ending a war involves a lot more than withdrawing troops. For one thing, you need these troops to evacuate civilians.

In fact, in any proper evacuation, the troops should be the last to go. First civilians, then equipment, then troops. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. But that’s what happens when people are obsessed with goals rather than process.

Goals are easy to have: I want to lose weight, I want to be happy, I want to be rich, I want to be healthy, and so on. What is not easy is the process to get there.

Biden was supremely confident about his goal: ending a war. He probably saw that as his personal legacy, doing what three previous presidents could not. And since he associated war directly with troops, all he could see was the withdrawal of those troops.

That may help explain why he ignored so many warnings from experts, including one from the nonpartisan Afghanistan Study Group, which used the word “catastrophic” to describe what would happen with an abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops.

His obsession with ending the war also made him overlook two key facts: one, the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan had shrunk dramatically from its early days, down to a miniscule 2500; and two, this modest troop investment maintained a humanitarian status quo that prevented terrorist thugs from taking over the country.

As Paul Miller, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who served as director for Afghanistan and Pakistan on the National Security Council for Presidents George W. Bush and Obama, wrote in The Dispatch:

“The US mission in Afghanistan accomplished some important successes. There have been no large-scale international terrorist attacks emanating from Afghanistan or Pakistan since 2001. The Afghan people broadly support the country’s new constitution. The Afghan economy showed consistent growth. By virtually every metric of human development, Afghans are better off today than they were 20 years ago. The intervention was not an unmitigated failure—except that many of these successes are likely to unravel with the Afghan army’s collapse.”

Biden surely knows that the U.S. already has an ongoing military presence in places like Japan and South Korea, which cost America $34 billion to maintain between 2016 and 2019. Why is it OK in those places and not Afghanistan? Is it because there’s no “war to end” in any of those areas?

Intoxicated by a desire to end something, Biden couldn’t see the value of an affordable status quo. Keeping a minimal troop presence in Afghanistan held no drama for Biden, even though, all things considered, it would have provided the greater good, both for Afghanis and for U.S. credibility around the world.

Intoxicated by a desire to end something, Biden couldn’t see the value of an affordable status quo.

In any case, his fixation with withdrawing the troops meant that when the time came, he couldn’t even do that right.

When the experts do get to the bottom of this debacle, I hope they will include the foibles of personal ambition. For now, Biden has a more urgent goal on his plate: rescuing the thousands of Americans and American supporters desperate to leave Kabul.