There was a moment during Tuesday’s Senate hearing on the withdrawal from Afghanistan when it became clear why President Joe Biden decided to withdraw troops from there as quickly as possible.
It happened when General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained why he and the other chiefs – senior army, air force, navy and navy officers – all agreed that we have to step down by August. 31. The Doha agreement, which President Trump signed with the Taliban in early 2020 (without any involvement from the Afghan government), called for a total withdrawal of foreign forces. If the US troops had stayed beyond August, Milley said, the Taliban would have resumed fighting and, in order to avoid the attacks, “we would have needed 30,000 troops” and suffered “a lot. losses”.
And yet, as Milley also testified on Tuesday, he, the Chiefs, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and other military officers advised Biden to keep 2,500 US troops in Afghanistan beyond the deadline of August 31. The difference is that these troops would not be attached to any “military mission”. Instead, they would “move on” to a “diplomatic mission”.
However, it is extremely unlikely that the Taliban observed the semantic distinction. In their eyes, 2,500 American soldiers would be considered 2,500 American soldiers, whether their mission is officially described as “military” or “diplomatic”. As a result, the Taliban would resume fighting, as Milley had said, and Biden would then be faced with a horrific choice: withdraw during an attack or send an additional 30,000 troops.
A certain historical-psychological perspective deserves to be noted. In the first nine months of Barack Obama’s presidency, generals were pushing for a major escalation of the war in Afghanistan – an increase of 40,000 troops – and a shift to a counterinsurgency strategy (a.k.a. nation ”). Biden, who was then vice president, was the only one to suggest an increase of just 10,000 troops, to be used only for training the Afghan army and to fight terrorists along the Afghan-Pakistan border. As Obama recalls in his memoir, Biden urged the relatively inexperienced new president not to be “locked up” by the generals. Give them 40,000 soldiers now, and in 18 months they will say they need another 40,000 to win the war. As Obama later admitted, Biden was right.
And so, as Milley advised President Biden to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, while acknowledging that another 30,000 might be needed if the Taliban resumed fighting, it’s easy to imagine Biden thinking, “They’re trying to kill me. lock up, just like they have done before, as they always have since the Vietnam War, ”which raged when Biden first entered the Senate in 1973 and has since shaped his views on the war and peace.
Milley and General Kenneth McKenzie, chief of central command, both admitted at the hearing that the U.S. military flew blind for much of its 20-year war in Afghanistan, the longest war in the world. American history. The officers of the time tried to mold the Afghan army in their own image, making it too dependent on American technology and support, so that once we pulled out, collapse was inevitable. Milley also noted that he and the other officers paid too little attention to Afghan culture and the corrosive effects of Afghan government corruption and lack of popular legitimacy. So Biden might well have thought, why should he care about anything did these guys have to say about the war in afghanistan, which they were wrong from the very beginning?
Biden made several missteps, some disastrous, in the pace and sequence of the withdrawal. Above all, he should have withdrawn all spies, contractors, American citizens and Afghan aides before withdrawing all troops. But overall he was right, and the generals, as they now reluctantly admit, were wrong.