Still the right decision to leave Afghanistan — yet still no accountability

Afghan militiamen join Afghan defense and security forces during a gathering in Kabul, Afghanistan, on June 23, 2021. A new report says decisions by Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan were key factors in the collapse of that nation’s military, leading to the Taliban takeover last year.

As the introspection and finger pointing on Afghanistan intensifies with the one-year anniversary of the Aug. 15 fall of Kabul, we must once again recognize that it was time for U.S. troops to leave Afghanistan. As war rages in Ukraine, and the strait of Taiwan become ever more contentious, it should be possible to recognize that the United States could not continue wasting resources and risking American lives on a losing peripheral strategic interest that distracted policymakers from the signal issues of our times.  

I spent more than three years in Afghanistan, the last two as U.S. ambassador; I followed the Doha peace process as senior adviser to the Secretary of State. There were never conditions for staying indefinitely, or even a few more years, and our failure was not because of a lack of will. We had made the commitment as a nation — almost $1 trillion of expenditure,including through the Great Recession of 2008 as millions of Americans lost their homes and livelihoods; as 1 million mostly young Americans from across our country were sent to Afghanistan to fight and die for an increasingly failing policy; and as we developed an almost ideological fixation on the “global war on terror” as the world changed and much more existential threats to the United States emerged. 

Our engagement in Afghanistan was never going to work fundamentally for two reasons: because we compounded mistakes on the battlefield, politically, and in assistance by masking over years just how badly our intervention was going; and second, because Afghans, sometimes for good reasons, did not fully commit to the transformation of their country. 

We never truly confronted what Afghans knew: that the Afghan government was deeply corrupt and largely dysfunctional, dependent on U.S. ambassadors, secretaries of State, and presidents to hold it together. At the provincial level, warlords loathed by the local population held sway, reinforcing the perception that the democratic political transformation was surface-deep.   

The Afghan armed forces never developed into an effective military, but year after year, U.S. government reports to Congress said they were on track to do so. The “surge” in U.S. forces, which temporarily dented the Taliban’s advance, would not have forestalled the inevitable even if it had continued. Ordinary Afghans knew what we never took seriously: that the Taliban had purpose and popular support inside the country and could not be defeated militarily as long as they had sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan.