Finally, Americans appear willing to bring the troops home. Will they stay there?
Last Wednesday, President Joe Biden announced he would withdraw all US ground troops from Afghanistan by September 11, the two-decade anniversary of the attacks that brought on the war. Then he visited the fallen at Arlington National Cemetery. A reporter asked him whether his decision was hard to make. “No, it wasn’t,” Biden replied. “To me, it was absolutely clear.”
Biden’s clarity shone through in the reasons he gave for terminating the mission in Afghanistan. Criticizing the grandiose and ill-defined objectives pursued by his successors, Biden refused to order US soldiers to engage any longer in a mission they could not achieve. He acknowledged that war among Afghans would likely continue, but he resolved to remove Americans from combat.
Adam Weinstein is a Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and was deployed to Afghanistan as a US Marine in 2012.
Stephen Wertheim is the Director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute and the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy