The president said on Wednesday that the United States had long ago accomplished its main mission of denying terrorists a haven in the country.
He made a case that there was no longer any justification — if there ever was — to believe that the United States military presence could turn Afghanistan into a stable democracy.
The roughly 2,500 American troops on the ground there are to be gradually withdrawn starting May 1 — the exit deadline the Trump administration negotiated last year with the Taliban — with the process complete by Sept. 11.
The war has killed more than 2,200 U.S. troops, wounded 20,000, and cost as much as $1 trillion.
“War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multigenerational undertaking,” Biden said, noting that service members now in Afghanistan have parents who served in the same war.
“We were attacked,” he said. "We went to war with clear goals. We achieved those objectives.”
“We were attacked,” he said. "We went to war with clear goals. We achieved those objectives.”
On Oct. 7, 2001, just weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W. Bush told Americans that the United States was invading Afghanistan.
Twenty years later, a series of Afghan governments has failed to sustain control over vast sections of the country. A succession of Afghan leaders, supported by the United States and its allies, has pledged to fight corruption, end the drug scourge and establish stable governance, but all those gains have proved fragile at best, says The New York Times.
Biden said at a news conference last month that “we’ve got to prove democracy works,” and he went on to describe a foreign policy that was focused on restoring America’s reputation for getting big things done. “China is outinvesting us by a long shot,” the president noted, “because their plan is to own that future.”
And "no one celebrated the American involvement in Afghanistan, or Iraq, more than the Chinese — conflicts that kept Americans up at night worrying about casualties and taking control of distant provinces, while Beijing focused on spreading its influence in regions of the world where America was once the unquestioned dominant power,” says a Times analysis.
By withdrawing the remaining few thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Biden is taking a calculated risk that extremists in Afghanistan can be countered by U.S. and partner forces elsewhere in the region — and that he won’t become the president who underestimated the resilience and reach of extremists who still aim to attack the United States, says The Associated Press.
Biden is the first president to reject the Pentagon’s recommendations that any withdrawal be “conditions based,” meaning that security would have to be assured on the ground before Americans pulled back. To do otherwise, military officials long have argued, would be to signal to the Taliban to just wait out the Americans — after which they would face little opposition to taking further control, and perhaps threatening Kabul.
Biden's decision was cheered by many Democrats but harshly criticized by most Republicans, who predicted that the withdrawal of American troops would embolden terrorists and hasten the collapse of the Afghan government.
As far as the reaction of Afghans, “for two decades, American leaders have pledged peace, prosperity, democracy, the end of terrorism and rights for women,” says a separate Times article. "Few of those promises have materialized in vast areas of Afghanistan, but now even in the cities where real progress occurred, there is fear that everything will be lost when the Americans leave."
When historians look back at this moment, they may conclude that Biden’s decision was predestined, says the Times’ analysis:
"The place is not called the Graveyard of Empires for nothing: The British pulled out in 1842, after an expedition their textbooks call the “disaster in Afghanistan,” and the Soviets in 1989, after a decade of death and frustration. What Soviet leaders learned in a decade, four American presidents learned over the span of two.”
"The place is not called the Graveyard of Empires for nothing: The British pulled out in 1842, after an expedition their textbooks call the “disaster in Afghanistan,” and the Soviets in 1989, after a decade of death and frustration. What Soviet leaders learned in a decade, four American presidents learned over the span of two.”
Here is the text of Biden’s announcement, from the White House.
After his announcement, Biden visited Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery to honor those who died in recent American conflicts. Here is a video.
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