Look, there were missteps and flaws in the way that Biden got us out of Afghanistan. But the massive focus on those flaws overlooks the super-important fact that BIDEN GOT US OUT OF AFGHANISTAN.
That war was called “the forever war” because people thought we would literally be there forever. Over 2,400 American troops died in the war. Over 20,000 were wounded in action. It lasted over 20 years. Biden ended it.
Writing for the Washington Post in September 2021, several weeks after we left, Eugene Robinson argued that critics’ focus on the negative was misplaced.
Biden and Harris have gotten things done.
The Obama administration talked for years about ending the war in Afghanistan and withdrawing American forces, but ended up agreeing to a troop surge instead. The Trump administration signed a bad deal, incompetently negotiated, to bring U.S. troops home but got booted out of office before being able to follow through.
Biden could have tried to get out of the bargain. Instead, he went ahead and fulfilled it. This nation’s longest war is over — any way you look at it, that’s a historic milestone, and one Biden has used to reshape U.S. goals abroad.
That same year, scholar Stephen Wertheim placed Biden’s action in a broader historical context in Foreign Policy.
Biden Just Made a Historic Break With the Logic of Forever War
The United States’ post-9/11 wars have been long, but it was not mainly their longevity that gave rise to the objection, on both the left and the right, that they had become endless. The problem lay in the nature of the objectives U.S. leaders chose to pursue. Extravagant goals, unnecessary to secure the United States, could not be fulfilled. The United States continued fighting anyway.
The so-called “war on terror” was endless by definition, “terror” being a sensation and a tactic that will always be part of human experience. For Americans, war came to appear normal, inescapable, eternal, even if its burdens fell on few of their own. Somehow the most powerful country on earth seemed incapable of being at peace.
In Afghanistan, successive presidents sought to build a new state and sustain it against insurgents. This was a mission that no foreign military could achieve, unmistakably so after a surge to 98,000 U.S. troops and thousands of troops from other NATO countries failed to suffice. From then on, the United States was fighting only to delay defeat. It had two coherent options: Keep on forever or stop at once.
Biden, the creature of Washington, has broken with the logic of endless war, at least in this one exemplary case. President Biden has not just decided to withdraw all U.S. troops, scrapping his campaign plan to leave residual forces behind. He has also delivered a methodical debunking of the forever-war mindset that has prevailed for decades.
Senator Chris Murphy likewise knocked the stuffings out of what he calls the “execute better” consensus — the idea that we might have won the war if we’d stayed just a little longer and carried it out a little better. Here are some of his thoughts in Why Biden's Afghanistan Critics Are Dangerously Wrong:
There is no doubt that the execution of the effort to end our military presence in Afghanistan and evacuate our citizens and allies was imperfect. A mission that complicated does not happen without errors. But the final results are, frankly, extraordinary. The biggest human airlift in American history, moving nearly 124,000 people in two weeks, cannot, by definition, be judged a “failure.”
Of course, the real desire of most in the “execute better” consensus was for America to just stay. They bristle at the phrase “forever war.” They tell themselves they don’t believe in staying in Afghanistan forever. They say they want to stay until we finish the job (which is defined as establishing an American-style representative government and American-style unified military command that can purge the Taliban from the country).
But if we couldn’t accomplish that goal in 20 years—the longest U.S. war in history—why on earth would things change after another five or 10? The goal is impossible, which is why the PowerPoint slide reads “stay until Afghanistan is stable,” while reality writes it as “stay forever.”
Is there still more foreign policy work to be done? 100%! Lots more work. But Biden did more than many people guessed could be done. He deserves a lot of credit. AND he deserves to be re-elected.
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These posts are written by Goodnewsroundup (Goodie),
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