Opinion: Don't believe Trump's politicking about Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal

Children holding Taliban flags in the back of a pickup

By Daniel R. DePetris

Aug. 26, 2024 3 AM PT

Three years ago, the U.S. military was at Kabul’s international airport frantically organizing evacuation flights out of Afghanistan as the Taliban returned to power in the capital city after a 20-year hiatus. The evacuation mission was rushed, with overwhelmed U.S. forces working to get as many Afghans out of the country as possible. The last U.S. military plane flew out of the airport on Aug. 31, ending a two-decade-long military mission, the longest in U.S. history.

The Biden administration received significant criticism both during and after the evacuation. Former national security advisor John Bolton said the Taliban would again provide a safe haven and support to Al Qaeda as it planned attacks against the United States. Retired Gen. David Petraeus, a onetime commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, stated that the withdrawal damaged America’s credibility around the world. Leon Panetta, the CIA director and Defense secretary during the Obama administration, went so far as to suggest that Biden may eventually have to send troops back to Afghanistan as President Obama did in Iraq.

In the three years since, none of these doomsday predictions have come to pass. Nonetheless, the weeks-long evacuation remains fodder for the campaign trail; former President Trump constantly reminds rallygoers of the “Afghanistan catastrophe,” hoping to use the chaotic withdrawal as a referendum on the Biden-Harris administration’s foreign policies.

Let there be no mistake: Afghanistan under the Taliban is a dismal place. The Afghan people have seen a significant reduction in their personal freedoms. Women and girls face severe restrictions, including on their right to education, work and travel.

However, the U.S. didn’t go into Afghanistan to turn the country into a democratic oasis. Rather, the aim was to hammer Al Qaeda for the 9/11 terrorist attack and hold the Taliban accountable for sheltering terrorists. Those objectives were achieved very early on in the war, only for Washington to foolishly expand the mission toward remaking Afghanistan’s politics and society root and branch.

For the U.S., the measure of success going forward should not be how progressive Afghan society is — centuries of history have shown that Afghanistan is impervious to foreign designs — but whether the U.S. can still defend itself against terrorism emanating from Afghanistan. The U.S. has managed to do that, and the Taliban government seems to understand that harboring terrorists is a recipe for losing the power regained after 20 long years of fighting.

Although U.S. intelligence-gathering in Afghanistan is hardly perfect, the U.S. today possesses a far better understanding of the country than it did during the early 1990s, when the Taliban first controlled the country and gave Osama bin Laden a redoubt to plan operations. How do we know? Because Washington was able to exploit technical and human intelligence sources to find and kill the most high-profile terrorist target in Afghanistan, former Al Qaeda chief Ayman Zawahiri. His death in a drone attack in July 2022 was precisely the kind of operation — clean, efficient and specific — that detractors of the U.S. withdrawal argued wouldn’t be possible if Washington ordered all troops out.

Apart from dispatching terrorist leaders, the U.S. has also exhibited a remarkable ability to, if not predict, then anticipate when terrorist attacks from Afghanistan-based groups are about to happen. Most of these concern the Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K. Earlier this year, American intelligence tracked ISIS-K threats in Iran and Russia and notified those countries’ governments. In both cases, according to public reports, the U.S. warnings specified the exact target that was about to be hit. Those warnings weren’t heeded. In Iran, ISIS-K killed 84 people with a bomb; in Moscow, four gunmen claiming ISIS-K affiliation slaughtered more than 140 people at a concert hall.

And what about the claim, heard so often in the weeks after the August 2021 withdrawal, that the Taliban would revert to its old ways, aiding and abetting America’s terrorist enemies? This, too, hasn’t exactly come to pass. Although U.N. monitors say that foreign fighters have indeed traveled to Afghanistan since the Taliban returned to power — there’s no doubt Al Qaeda retains a presence there — those fighters don’t have unfettered movement. In fact, the same U.N. monitors assess that the Taliban is attempting to restrict the fighters’ activities, if only to ensure its own power isn’t challenged. The Taliban is monitoring some groups and fighting others — including ISIS-K — which is an improvement, from the U.S. perspective, on its behavior before 9/11. The motivation is self-interest: The Taliban is reluctant to jeopardize its status and power by repeating the past.

As far as notions of plummeting U.S. credibility, nothing in the three years since the withdrawal suggests that Petraeus’ diagnosis is correct. In fact, the opposite is the case. U.S. allies and partners not only remain committed to their strategic relationships with Washington but are seeking to expand them. In June, Japan and South Korea agreed to expand trilateral military exercises with the U.S. as they seek to preserve a favorable balance of power in East Asia. Washington’s NATO allies continue to look to the U.S. to lead the West’s response against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Global approval of U.S. leadership is at 41%, slightly down from 45% in 2021 but the same as it was about a decade ago.

Afghanistan is still a dangerous place and hope for a better future for ordinary Afghans is low. But the prediction that the U.S. troop departure would automatically lead to disaster for U.S. security hasn’t come to pass.

Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities. @DanDePetris