- In April of this year, Biden announced that he had decided that the United States would leave Afghanistan and postponed the departure date to the end of August.
- The Taliban accelerated their actions, the Afghan army stopped fighting, and government officials surrendered their cities without resistance. This is the influence of Biden’s decision.
- According to the Washington Post, if the United States leaves 2,500 soldiers in the country and provides air support, it will “Enough to maintain a weak balance”.
After President Joe Biden decided to withdraw US troops before August 31, the Taliban quickly took over Afghanistan. Critics asked: Why didn’t he just leave 2,500 soldiers there to consolidate the now down government?
After Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, slashed his number from 15,000, when Biden took office in January, the US military remained in the country.
On the surface, in the year after Trump signed the withdrawal agreement with the Taliban insurgents on February 29, 2020, the 2,500 soldiers and 16,000 American civilian contractors behind them seemed to be enough to keep the Afghan government in power.
Trump set the final withdrawal date as May 1, 2021, and even tried to speed up the process.
Although the Taliban have stepped up their attacks on Afghan government targets, their gains are still limited to non-strategic rural areas.
However, following the agreement, their attacks on the United States and NATO forces almost dried up at the same time. After Trump reached an agreement, no American soldiers were killed.
Critics believe that this shows that Kabul can stand firm against the insurgents if supported by a backbone of American troops.
They said that a deadlock on the battlefield is preferable to an all-out victory by the Taliban.
“We have only 2500 soldiers there, light touch, no chaos, not a single American soldier was killed in battle in a year,” Republican Supreme Senator Mitch McConnell said this week.
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He urged Biden to increase support for the Afghan army instead of leaving.
McConnell said:
If we let the Taliban rule Afghanistan and let al Qaeda return, it will resonate in the global jihadist movement.
“The Third Decade of Conflict”
Biden, who has long advocated withdrawing from Afghanistan, initiated a review after taking office.
In April, he announced his decision: The United States will leave, but the deadline for leaving was delayed by three months to the end of August.
Biden explained on August 16 that he chose “either to implement the agreement or prepare to go back to fight the Taliban.”
He said that if there is no withdrawal date, the Taliban will resume their attacks on American targets.
He said: “If there are no US military casualties after May 1, there will be no stable status quo.”
The choice is “either withdraw our troops in accordance with the agreement, or escalate the conflict and send thousands of American troops back to Afghanistan to fight in the third decade of conflict.”
Aim for balance
The impact of Biden’s decision is staggering. The Taliban accelerated their actions, the Afghan army stopped fighting, and government officials surrendered their city without resistance until the fall of Kabul on August 15.
Military historian Max Bout wrote an article in The Washington Post that directly linked Biden’s decision to withdraw troops with the disintegration of the Afghan army.
He wrote: “Many people think that there is no difference with just 2,500 U.S. troops.”
“The history of the past few months has denied this view: the last Taliban offensive began when the U.S. troop withdrawal was nearing completion.”
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If the United States leaves 2,500 soldiers in the country and continues to provide air support to the Afghan army, “it will be enough to maintain the fragile balance of the Taliban’s progress in the countryside, but each city is still controlled by the government,” Bout said.
Deep dependence
One thing Biden and his critics agree on is that the Afghan government and security forces are very dependent on the United States.
With the loss of US military support, technical knowledge, and funds, the security edifice in Afghanistan collapsed.
Critics say that the U.S. military should stay, just as the U.S. has retained 2,500 troops in Iraq since World War II and the Korean War, and retained more troops in Germany, South Korea, and Japan.
They say it is worth it to prevent jihadists allied with al-Qaeda from taking over the country.
Biden and his supporters say that the ongoing cost of American lives and money is unreasonable to support an openly corrupt and inefficient government in Kabul.
Biden said the results will be the same in five years.
Sullivan said that White House national security adviser Jack Sullivan believes that even if the Trump administration increased the presence of the U.S. military to 15,000 in 2017, the Afghan army has lost its position.
“What happened in the past month has decisively proved that to stop the Taliban’s attack, a large number of American troops are required, which is several times more than the number obtained by President Biden. And we will cause casualties.”
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