Biden’s Afghanistan exit: A decision for the long term

President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, however botched the execution, looks good when measured against the flawed criticism of it.

His opponents, some of whom even want to impeach him, claim Biden could have kept a small force in Afghanistan indefinitely and maintained stability; that model has worked elsewhere in Korea, Japan and Europe, they contend, and that the retreat is a gift for adversaries, China, Russia and Pakistan.

There is no more vituperative critic than South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who wants to impeach the president over Afghanistan. In an interview last weekend, Graham charged that Biden should have remained there and “held the Taliban to the conditions set out in the agreement with Trump.”

Trump’s February 2020 Doha agreement with the Taliban called for removal of all U.S. forces by this past May, provided there were no attacks on Americans in the interim and that subsequently Afghanistan would not be used as a staging ground for terrorism. Trump, who cut the Afghan government out of the negotiations, also agreed to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners. Then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called it “the best opportunity for peace in a generation.”

Trump’s surrender was welcomed by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — now that it is being implemented by a Democratic president, Pompeo assails Biden’s “weakness” and McConnell calls it “one of the worst foreign policy decisions” in American history.

More honestly, former Trump national security adviser H.R. McMaster called the DOHA agreement a “surrender.”

The Taliban didn’t attack American forces over the last year and a half. Biden, of course, could have reneged on that pact and kept American forces in the country. There is no doubt, however, that the Taliban, which was steadily gaining control over more territory, would have started attacking Americans.

The pressure then would have been to increase the American forces: the endless war.

There is no parallel to the seven-decades-old American troop involvement in Germany, Japan and South Korea. In those places “there was no insurgency demanding the U.S. exit,” notes Vali Nasr, a top State Department official on Afghanistan and Pakistan during the Obama administration.

Twenty years after the start of the U.S. commitment, Japan and Germany were among a handful of the world’s strongest economies and functioning democracies. It took South Korea a little longer, but it got there.

During the 20-year war, there were impressive small gains for women and girls, and some entrepreneurism and non-profits. But the U.S.-backed regime was thoroughly corrupt — read the Afghanistan papers or the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s reports — and this tribal land had no promise of replicating the experiences of those others.

Along with the suffering the Taliban will inflict, there are other worries. The carelessness of the initial withdrawals raises questions about the lack of any peers in the Biden constellation — a Jim Baker, Leon Panetta, Rahm Emanuel or Brett Scowcroft — who more easily might have said “Wait a minute, Mr. President.” Biden is surrounded by a highly capable staff; they are staffers, not peers.

It’s inexplicable too why a president who vowed to end Trump’s go-it-alone policies failed to adequately consult with allies.

More dubious is the notion this is a big gain for our adversaries. Russia learned the hard way to stay away from Afghanistan. There may be minor economic opportunities for China, but given its outrageous treatment of Uyghurs, it must be a little wary of a fundamentalist Islamist regime on its border.

Pakistan, who surreptitiously aided the Taliban, probably preferred the way it was. There’s a Pakistani Taliban that could cause trouble now.

Finally, as messy as this has been and for all the tragic ramifications in Afghanistan, it no longer will be an American distraction.

To me, that’s reminiscent of a column written by one of the great newsmen I’ve ever known, Wallace Carroll, who in 1968 was the publisher of the Winston Salem Journal. During his earlier time as a top New York Times editor in Washington, he knew prominent policy makers.

Carroll was a Cold War Democrat, but in March 1968, he wrote a front-page editorial calling for America to withdraw from Vietnam — not for the liberal peacenik reasons but because it had become a distraction: the country needed to focus on the far more important matter of the Soviet Union’s expansionism.

Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, a like-minded Cold War Democrat, gave the editorial to President Johnson, who two weeks later said he wouldn’t run for reelection.

It took seven more years, but Carroll was prescient. Today the probabilities are that Biden will prove more so than his critics.

Al Hunt is the former executive editor of Bloomberg News. He previously served as reporter, bureau chief and Washington editor for the Wall Street Journal. For almost a quarter century he wrote a column on politics for The Wall Street Journal, then The International New York Times and Bloomberg View. He hosts Politics War Room with James Carville. Follow him on Twitter @AlHuntDC.