By Bonnie Kristian
The U.S. war in Afghanistan is scheduled to end on May 1. So says the deal with the Taliban negotiated by Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan appointed by the Trump administration and retained by President Joe Biden. If the deadline is met, the United States will finish our longest war a few months shy of the two-decade anniversary of invasion.
But will the deadline be met? The Biden administration is waffling, the president calls meeting the withdrawal deadline "tough," and this week’s revelation that the U.S. footprint in Afghanistan is nearly 50% larger than previously thought (3,500 troops rather than 2,500) means the logistics of withdrawal would be slightly more complicated than anticipated. Meanwhile, the drumming insistence that it’s too soon to leave — perhaps the steadiest beat in American politics for more than 19 years and four presidential administrations — is only growing louder.
Biden should ignore it. He was a voice of comparative restraint as a member of the Obama administration, and this inherited deadline would let him begin to deliver on his pledge to “end the forever wars.”
This piece was originally published in USA Today on March 23, 2021. Read more HERE.