On August 31, 2021, President Joe Biden concluded America’s longest war, the war in Afghanistan. After Al-Qaeda had attacked the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan to punish Afghanistan for providing safe haven for terrorists. The twenty-year campaign has cost more than a trillion dollars and the lives of over 2400 American soldiers.

Although the goal to eradicate Al-Qaeda had been primarily completed by 2011, American forces continued to occupy Afghanistan. The American public was told that the objective in the region would shift from eliminating Al-Qaeda to helping build up Afghanistan as an extension of American democracy and ideals. However, this effort was fraught with corruption and incompetence. The American public was given insight into just how disastrous this effort was with the release of the Afghanistan Papers. This bombshell exposé contained more than 2000 pages of verbal and written statements by the generals and government officials at the head of the operation.

In his interview, three-star Army General Douglas Lute said that America “[was] devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan – we didn’t know what we were doing…We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.” John Spoko, the inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, said that the Afghan army had no stable leadership, the result of corrupt, untrained, and strategically inept generals. Illiteracy among these generals was also highlighted. The generals withheld pay from their soldiers and used the United States’ funding to line their own pockets. On August 15, 2021, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled Kabul at the first sight of Taliban militants. With the government collapsing, Afghan soldiers, who had gone months without pay or stable leadership, deserted because they had no desire to sacrifice themselves for a country that thought nothing of them.

The American attempt to construct its ideal version of Afghanistan can only be described as an abject failure, and the war in Afghanistan was one of the largest wastes of American resources in modern history. Even before we began to withdraw, the Taliban had been capturing more and more of Afghanistan since resuming offensive attacks in 2004. Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to several US generals, told interviewers that “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible…Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right.” The problems that led to the disastrous exit from Afghanistan had been actively suppressed in order to maintain the public’s favorable opinion of the war. 

The cause for the chaotic exit can be placed on most of the past few Presidential administrations and is a result of 20 years of terrible foreign policy decisions. In addition, there had been no interviews for the Special Immigrant Visa program, going back all the way to March 2020, making it much harder for Afghan allies to exit the country with the proper paperwork. The Biden administration should have ensured that all American citizens, Afghan allies, and any refugees they intended to take home had a safe way out of the country. The rushed exit was further exacerbated by an overestimation of the Afghan army’s strength because America expected them to be able to hold off the Taliban for some time. This overreliance on the Afghan military led to some American citizens being trapped in the country when the government collapsed. However, the current government has ensured that many of these citizens have been evacuated. Eighty-five of the last Americans who had remained in Afghanistan had departed on a commercial flight in mid-September, almost two weeks after the official end of the airlift. 

The decision to withdraw from Afghanistan is one that will be looked back on as a huge turning point in American foreign policy. By pulling out, Biden is taking a huge step towards ending the wars in the Middle East. These huge expenditures have cost billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars and thousands of American lives. Although marred by logistical missteps and the attack on the Kabul airport, tragically killing 13 US service members, the long-term implications of this decision will ultimately help save American lives and resources. Tulsi Gabbard, an Army veteran, succinctly captured the core of the issue in a 2020 primary debate when she said, “The Taliban were there long before we came in and will be there long after we leave.” We completed the main objectives of the invasion 10 years ago and then attempted and failed to build a nation in Afghanistan.

Read Jake Stephen’s (‘23) rebuttal of this point of view here.

Withdrawing from Afghanistan: What went wrong?