Biden’s withdrawal is one area of continuity with his predecessor, although unlike Donald Trump, this administration consulted the Afghans, US allies and its own agencies before announcing the decision. But both presidents were responding to a national weariness of “forever wars”.
To the surprise of no one, the Republican party that acquiesced in Trump’s order to get the troops out by May, is now launching attacks on Biden’s “reckless” decision. The political attacks will mount if, as many expected, the current peace initiative fails and the Taliban steps up their offensive.
In the Obama administration, Biden was a consistent voice of scepticism over the utility of military force in foreign policy, sometimes in opposition to advocates of humanitarian intervention.
He bluntly told a television interviewer on the campaign trail that he would feel “zero responsibility” if the status of Afghan women and other human rights suffered as a consequence of a US withdrawal.
“Are you telling me that we should go into China, go to war with China because what they’re doing to the Uyghurs,” he asked his CBS interviewer.
Safeguarding Afghan women and civil society has never been an official aim of the vestigial US military presence, but in the absence of a clearly defined goal, it became part of the de facto rationale.
“There are things that American officials have said over time to encourage that kind of thinking,” said Laurel Miller, who served as US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and now runs the Asia programme of the International Crisis Group.
“I’ll admit to – when I was in government – not feeling comfortable with some of those statements of enduring commitment, because I didn’t think it was believable.”
In making this decision, Biden has made clear he is setting aside Colin Powell’s famous “Pottery Barn rule”: if you break it, you own it. The quote comes from 2002 when the then secretary of state cited the fictional rule (which is not the policy of that furniture store) to warn George W Bush of the implications of invading Iraq. In Afghanistan, the US has part-owned the store for two decades now, and in reality, people and their livelihoods are still getting smashed.
by Julian Borger, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Kim Jae-Hwan/AFP/Getty Images[ed. Finally. The problem being there was never a Plan B to start with. Just making stuff up as we went along (a textbook example of mission creep). See also: What Did the U.S. Get for $2 Trillion in Afghanistan? (NYT)]
