Like many veterans of America’s post-9/11 wars, I started getting a flurry of WhatsApp messages and calls five years ago this week. Afghan interpreters were reaching out, frantically, to get those they loved on a plane to America before their country fell to the Taliban. Seemingly overnight, the Afghan government and armed forces were collapsing, as the United States conducted the final withdrawal announced by then-President Joe Biden four months earlier. The resulting chaos would be the first crisis of his administration, one that would permanently handicap the president’s approval rating and agenda.
Five years and countless crises later, it is clear that Biden made a necessary and ultimately sound decision.
The speed of the Taliban reconquest in 2021 shocked the world. The Taliban began a general offensive that May and provincial capitals fell like dominoes. In most places, Afghan National Security Forces soldiers and policemen simply put down their weapons and went home, in a manner wholly consistent with centuries of internecine Afghan tribal warfare. The failure to anticipate and plan for this possibility, especially given that the exact same thing had happened to the Taliban 20 years prior, spoke to how little U.S. soldiers, spies, and policymakers ever understood the country.
Taliban troops entered Kabul on August 15, 2021. They did so with forbearance and caution, accepting the city’s surrender and allowing the U.S. to execute a hasty yet prolonged aerial withdrawal. The U.S. Air Force evacuated more than 120,000 people, but an ISIS suicide bomber killed 169 Afghan civilians, 11 U.S. Marines, one soldier, and one sailor. In a tragically appropriate coda to the entire war, a U.S. drone strike then killed an Afghan aid worker and seven children, mistaking them for an ISIS cell.
The U.S. withdrawal was chaotic, humiliating, and sometimes deadly, a testament to faulty intelligence analysis, overly optimistic planning assumptions, and the enduring limits of U.S. military power to solve Afghanistan’s wicked problems. Yet attacks on the withdrawal had an ulterior motive, as a means to elide the more profound failure of the entire war.
It is clear that Biden made a necessary and ultimately sound decision.
Opponents of withdrawal, many of them former senior U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, still argue that a small U.S. force of a few thousand special operators and support personnel could have kept the Taliban permanently at bay through raids and airstrikes. They often point to the paucity of U.S. casualties in the war’s final years as evidence of the low risk of staying the course.
This is a misrepresentation, though. The Taliban made few attempts to kill U.S. troops after President Trump’s 2020 Doha accords pledged America to a phased withdrawal. Afghanistan’s once-and-future rulers were keeping their powder dry for the final phase of the civil war that they initiated the following spring.
The success of prior coalition special operation raids was almost beside the point. Even as helicopter-borne U.S. commandos killed and captured scores of Taliban leaders, the Afghan government was being ejected from the countryside. By 2015 the war was the Afghan National Security Forces’ to win or lose. They were clearly and irreversibly losing it. One-third of all ANSF manpower had to be replaced every year due to casualties, desertion, and troops failing to re-enlist. The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, as the corrupt U.S. client state was named, failed to command any meaningful loyalty.
As the situation outside the major cities steadily worsened, the U.S. government pulled down the curtains. Color-coded district stability maps, a critical if imperfect tool of analysis, went away when the U.S. military stopped collecting district stability data in October 2018. John Sopko, then Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, told reporters: “Almost every indicia, metric for success or failure is now classified or nonexistent.” The Afghan National Security Forces collapse and Taliban victory was a foregone conclusion; the only questions were its timing and speed.
Had American troops stayed in Afghanistan after 2021, they would have become hostages to technology and geopolitics. Russia, Iran, and potentially even China would have had a small, vulnerable American contingent on their doorstep. Drones, mortars, and Afghanistan’s difficult terrain would likely have created a military disaster: one or more isolated U.S. bases surrounded, hammered with indirect fire, and annihilated. An American Dien Bien Phu would have been a realistic prospect.
In the years since the U.S. left Afghanistan, Russia has started a war in Ukraine and America has started one in Iran. In both instances, U.S. adversaries would have been elated to be offered an easy target to strike, a healthy concentration of American troops in a country where they had both geographic access and potential proxies. Far from being a strategically useful base, as some hawks claimed at the time, Afghanistan would have become the Achilles’ heel of unrelated U.S. foreign policy actions thousands of miles away.
The technological developments of the past decade have taken this hypothetical from plausible to near-certain. The FPV (first-person view) drone has become the new improvised explosive device: a lethal, simple, and cheap weapon, built using mostly commercial components and frustratingly resistant to technological or tactical defeat by Western militaries. After their coming-out party on the battlefields of Ukraine and emergence in the Middle East during the Iran conflict, FPV’s are now bedeviling armies in every corner of the globe. The Taliban was already using small drones before U.S. forces withdrew, as U.S. Marines wrote after returning from one of the war’s last deployments.
Many in the cottage industry of counter-terrorism professionals also argued against a withdrawal, asserting that a post-American Afghanistan would again become a safe haven for terrorists or even a terror state under the resurgent Taliban. But the United States swiftly demonstrated successful over-the-horizon counter-terrorism capability, killing al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul by drone less than a year after the withdrawal. In the years since, ISIS has fought the Taliban internally and violence has spilled across the border with Pakistan, but terrorists have not regained the ability to strike internationally from Afghanistan. The Taliban’s fractious relations with Pakistan and Iran are unfortunate, but they are a regional problem, not a global one.
This is not to whitewash the Taliban government now ruling in Kabul. It remains a harsh authoritarian regime, one that denies women and girls basic rights and crushes any attempts at political dissent. But as journalists and other Westerners who have visited recently report, Afghanistan is more peaceful now than it has been in half a century.
The Taliban has also left most Afghans alone. My interpreters were lucky: they made it to America with their immediate family members before the Taliban returned to power. The relatives they left behind would rather be in America or another country with more opportunity and freedom, but they tell me their lives are not in danger.
Many former American partners can’t say the same. The Special Immigrant Visa program that brought tens of thousands of former interpreters and other Afghan U.S. government employees to America was notorious for its bureaucracy, delays, and inertia. Like the war itself, the Special Immigrant Visa program was a decade-long bipartisan failure before being further undermined by toxic anti-immigrant politics. The majority of applicants were left behind when U.S. forces withdrew. That stain on the United States will endure, but it both pre- and post-dates the withdrawal.
President Biden and his administration deserve scrutiny and blame for a host of foreign policy decisions and their consequences. They helped arm Ukraine and preserve its independence from Russia but were unable to prevent a grinding war of attrition. Their unyielding support for Israel’s brutal war of vengeance in Gaza killed tens of thousands and, according to the author of the Democratic National Committee’s 2024 campaign autopsy, helped reelect Donald Trump. But in choosing to finally end America’s longest overseas war and bring America’s remaining troops home from Afghanistan, Joe Biden made the right call.
