A year ago this month, the world dramatically changed for the Afghan people: after the U.S. military began withdrawing in the summer of 2021, the central government in Kabul fell in August and the Taliban completed its takeover. While the evacuation at the end of the month was chaotic and painful to watch — 13 American service members, mostly in their 20s, perished in Aug. 26 in a terror attack outside the airport — the festering humanitarian crisis left behind has been a source of growing frustration among observers here, and even worse for those still living there.
Meanwhile, questions about the wisdom of the 20-year war and foreign occupation persist among Americans, particularly veterans who sacrificed their lives and limb for something they felt had no lasting impact on Afghanistan at all.
So we asked more than 20 scholars, journalists, veterans and advocates on both sides — Afghan and American — if they thought the 2021 military withdrawal was the right thing to do, or not.
Andrew Bacevich, Obaidullah Baheer, Michael C. Desch, Torek Farhadi, Sara Haghdoosti, Nadizila Jamshidi, Ann Jones, Sahar Khan, Charles Kupchan, Joshua Landis, Anatol Lieven, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, Alexander McCoy, Aaron David Miller, Arta Moeini, Paul Pillar, Haroun Rahimi, Will Ruger, Masuda Sultan, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Adam Weinstein, Sarah Leah Whitson, Arash Yaqin
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Andrew Bacevich, president of the Quincy Institute, professor emeritus, Boston University
Was President Biden right to pull the plug on the U.S. war in Afghanistan? The honest answer is that only time will tell. Ten or fifty years from now, the wisdom or unwisdom of President Biden's decision to complete the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan may well appear different than they do today. But given the facts available to Biden in 2021 — above all, the abysmal results achieved after 20 years of nation-building — prolonging the effort was unlikely to serve any useful purpose. Persisting in folly is not a strategy.
With defeat comes bitterness. Those who served in Afghanistan have every right to feel bitter about the outcome of their war. Yet only by recognizing our defeat does it become possible to learn from this sad and costly episode.
The fact is that Afghanistan has become an unaffordable distraction — a massive “burn pit” that consumes time, attention, and resources for no purpose. Rarely in American history has the disparity between interests and efforts been so great.
In the wake of our failure in Afghanistan, the need to recalibrate U.S. strategic priorities are manifest. Unfortunately, distracted by ongoing and prospective wars elsewhere, the Biden administration shows little capacity to undertake that essential task.
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Obaidullah Baheer, an adjunct lecturer at the American University of Afghanistan and visiting scholar at the New School.
There are many stakeholders to keep in mind while answering such a question. However, the answer to whether it is right for the United States to leave Afghanistan is one that receives an affirmative answer on all stakeholders' fronts. The withdrawal helped stop the U.S. from bleeding resources and losing its soldiers to a war that should have never been started and it eliminated the central motive for insurgency in Afghanistan. Stability in Afghanistan would also help the region prosper as well.
The more pertinent question though is whether the U.S. left in the right manner? The answer to that has to be negative. The United States missed many opportunities after its initial invasion to reconcile with the Taliban but took two decades to arrive at that conclusion. The lack of coordination with the Afghan Republic in power made them lose legitimacy and a chance at setting any terms with the Taliban for a possible peace settlement. The Doha deal between the United States and the Taliban became more of a surrendering of Afghanistan back to the Taliban. A peace settlement would have been a great start for a process of reconciliation, one that is now at the mercy of the Taliban.
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Michael C. Desch, Packey J. Dee Professor of International Relations and Brian and Jeannelle Brady Family Director of the Notre Dame International Security Center
A year after America's chaotic withdrawal from Kabul, critics are still using the club of an earlier ugly American departure from Vietnam to beat the Biden Administration and other proponents of cutting our losses in a failed war in Afghanistan. The historical comparison they make is fair; the implications they draw from it are flat out wrong!
Critics suggest that the United States' disorganized exit from Afghanistan was unnecessary and it emboldened our adversaries Russia (in Ukraine) and China (Taiwan). We heard the same charges in the mid-1970s: the fall of the Vietnam domino was not inevitable, if only America had stayed the course; and it would lead to further victories by our adversaries. Few serious analysts, then or now, think that there was a real road to v