The U.S. was right to leave Afghanistan

Would maintaining a U.S. posture of roughly 2,500 troops have prevented the Afghan government’s fall, as McKenzie insists? The U.S. actually increased troop levels in August 2021 to 5,000 in order to assist the evacuation process, double what McKenzie had recommended to U.S. policy-makers at the time. Yet it had no effect whatsoever on preventing Taliban fighters from roaming the streets of Kabul unopposed.

Observers such as McKenzie and Petraeus may reject the notion that withdrawing completely was the only good option U.S. policy-makers had left. But the alternatives were terrible and would have been far more costly to U.S. forces than it was for them to accept the infeasibility of the situation and pack their bags. Hypothetically, President Biden could have chosen to keep a military presence in Afghanistan past his September 11 withdrawal date in a vain attempt to give the Afghan government more time to get its act together. Yet the question inevitably comes up: for how long? How many more months or years was the U.S. supposed to wait? At what point should U.S. policy-makers have finally said, “Enough, we’ve waited as long as we can?” Precedent would suggest that the question would never be asked. It wasn’t long ago when President Barack Obama wanted to pull the U.S. out of Afghanistan, only to wind up vacating the Oval Office leaving the job undone.

Nor would extending the U.S. stay in Afghanistan be without extreme complications. The insurgency simply wasn’t going to tolerate anything other than a full U.S. exit. Taliban officials made it clear that a U.S. presence past Biden’s September 11 deadline would be viewed as an abrogation of the 2020 Doha accord, increasing the likelihood of a resumption of widespread attacks against U.S. forces. Any American casualties would require Biden to increase the U.S. troop level for force-protection purposes, creating additional targets for the Taliban. All of a sudden, the U.S. military would have been, once again, fighting a war it simply couldn’t win.