‘The Fall of Afghanistan: An American Tragedy’

The conventional view has been that Trump and Biden made the correct decision to withdraw the US from Afghanistan, but the actual departure was flawed. On the contrary, the US should not have withdrawn and the actual departure was not a failure. The withdrawal was against the US’ larger strategic interests beyond counterterrorism. If it withdrew, it should not have done so unconditionally, for both its interests (including humanitarian) and assets were substantial. The US should not have negotiated with the Taliban absent the Afghan government, thereby undermining the government’s and its security forces’ will to fight. Thus, the success of the Taliban’s revolution owed more to the Afghan government’s collapse than its revolutionary mobilization. In withdrawing from Afghanistan, the US showed that it failed to learn lessons from its withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, which led to internal political decay in Iraq, the re-emergence of terrorism, and larger strategic setbacks for Washington. More broadly, the US failed to appreciate how its withdrawal of support for regimes dependent on it often facilitates the coming to power of hostile revolutionary movements.