By Daniel DePetris
One year ago, the last U.S. troops flew out of Kabul International Airport in the dead of night, ending the longest war in U.S. history. The event was a milestone for the very simple reason that, for the first time in 20 years, Americans could wake up in the morning knowing there isn’t a single U.S. soldier operating on Afghan soil. There were no celebrations or ticker-tape parades: only a collective sense of relief that Washington was disassociating itself from an unwinnable “war.”
Critics of the U.S. troop withdrawal, however, are using the first anniversary of this weighty decision as an opportunity to relitigate the debate on their own terms. Unfortunately for them, the case for staying in Afghanistan remains just as poor as it always was.
The critiques have come from the usual quarters. Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) alleged that the Afghanistan withdrawal “enticed Putin to invade Ukraine” and persuaded China to rattle Taiwan militarily. In these pages, Senator Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) argued that the removal of U.S. forces was a slap in the face of Afghan women and girls, who are now forced to live with the depravities of a second Taliban regime. Still others, like General Kenneth McKenzie, who oversaw all U.S. troops in Afghanistan, claim that keeping a residual U.S. presence of around 2,500 personnel could have averted the humiliating collapse of the Afghan government. General David Petraeus, the architect of the 2007–08 surge in Iraq and a former commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, faulted “a lack of American strategic patience” for the war’s inglorious end.
Granted, the Taliban’s nationwide offensive in August 2021 was a shock to the U.S. intelligence community and to Biden personally, who admitted a day after the Taliban’s capture of Kabul that the Afghan army fell apart “more quickly than we had anticipated.” Yet none of the withdrawal’s critics sufficiently explains why U.S. interests would have been best served by extending an intervention to keep a failed state from collapsing.
This piece was originally published in National Review on August 31, 2022. Read more HERE.