The Biden administration wants to close the final chapter of America’s longest war. The Taliban want to write the epilogue. Will terrorists again threaten America from Afghanistan? Will the Taliban defeat the democratically elected government? What will be the fate of women once the US and its NATO allies leave? Will Afghans surprise the world and chart a new course?
Less than one week after President Biden announced that all U.S. and NATO forces will leave Afghanistan by September 11, 2021, the senior U.S. military leadership’s deep unease with that decision burst into public view.
Central Command chief Gen. Kenneth McKenzie told the House Armed Services Committee that stopping Al Qaeda from striking the United States from outside Afghanistan — “over the horizon” — will be “extremely difficult” but “not impossible.”
He revealed that no regional neighbors have agreed to host U.S. counterterrorism forces in the future, and most neighboring countries are already “hedging” against the possible return of civil war to Afghanistan.
The U.S. Intelligence Community’s ability to monitor the terrorist threat in the region will decline, McKenzie testified Tuesday, and Taliban promises to reject attempts by Al Qaeda to reestablish a terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan cannot be trusted.
Meanwhile, the roughly 15,000 western defense contractors who sustain and maintain the Afghan Security Forces – the major force keeping the Taliban from reclaiming absolute power – will follow U.S. troops out the exit door.
“Right now, most contractors are going to leave, and certainly all U.S. contractors will leave. We’re looking at doing some distance contracting, but clearly there will be things we will not be able to do once those contractors leave, and I don’t want to minimize that,” said McKenzie, who promised to be a relentless advocate for keeping a sharp focus on what happens in Afghanistan after U.S. troops leave. “We know the aspirations of the terrorists to attack the United States hasn’t gone away. Their ability to do that has been depressed, but the aspiration hasn’t gone away. And it’s certainly possible that their ability to do that will grow.”
The Forever War
In the end the U.S. military’s attempt to honor a long tradition – leaving a land of tyranny sanctified by the loss of American blood and treasure a little better and more democratic – was eclipsed by the passage of too much time and the dictates of democracy itself.
After two decades, war-weary opponents of a continued U.S. military presence on both the right and left have successfully labeled those efforts a “forever war.”
President Joe Biden embraced that narrative in announcing the withdrawal from Afghanistan of all US troops.
“We already have service members doing their duty in Afghanistan today whose parents served in the same war. We have service members who were not yet born when our nation was attacked on [September 11, 2001],” Biden said last week from the White House Treaty room, the same spot where President George W. Bush announced the initial U.S. strikes on Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan nearly two decades earlier. “War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multi-generational undertaking. We were attacked. We went to war with clear goals. We achieved those objectives. [Osama] Bin Laden is dead, and Al Qaeda is degraded in Afghanistan. And it’s time to end the forever war.”
Despite the rhetoric of a mission accomplished, however, Biden’s address was notable for what was not said. The U.S. military effort in Afghanistan has dwindled to a few thousand U.S. troops working mostly in the background to advise and assist Afghan soldiers willing to fight and risk death for their country, while suffering four troops killed in action in 2020, the lowest number of U.S. combat deaths in the country in a calendar year since the war began. Far more troops were killed in training accidents during that time.
Absent critical enablers like U.S. airpower, ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance), and logistics, Afghan Security Forces and the government they backstop are likely to collapse.
The consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community is that a bloody civil war will probably ensue. In a recent classified intelligence assessment, the U.S. Intelligence Community reportedly told the Biden administration that if U.S. troops leave before a power-sharing agreement is reached between the Taliban and the Afghan government, the Islamist extremist group could once again impose their iron grip and totalitarian ideology on the Afghan people within two or three years.
Thus would history repeat itself. “There are a lot of details about the nature and magnitude of our continued commitment to Afghanistan and in the region that are still unknown, but I do fear that we will look back on this withdrawal decision a couple of years from now and regret it,” David Petraeus, former director of the CIA and commander of all U.S. and allied forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq, told Breaking Defense in an interview. Security has already eroded over the past two years as the U.S. has reduced forces and critical enablers, he noted, and without that support he worries that the Afghan Security Forces may crumble.
“At that point you could see a return to the kind of civil war that followed the collapse of the post-Soviet government and the likely exodus of international aid organizations and Afghans who have an option to leave,” said Petraeus. “In a worst case scenario, it could start to resemble Saigon in 1975.”
Afghan Study Group
In February 2020 the Trump administration signed the Doha agreement, setting a May 1, 2021 deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. A short time later, the Congressionally-established Afghanistan Study Group began a nearly year-long effort to interview scores of experts and stakeholders in the Afghan conflict to analyze the implications of a possible peace settlement between the Afghan government and the Taliban, as well as the costs of failure to reach such a settlement.
Released in February 2021, the Afghan Study Group report strongly recommended extending the withdrawal deadline for U.S. forces and, more importantly, conditioning it on all parties to the agreement fulfilling their commitments. That stipulation was necessary because the Taliban has notably failed to honor their side of the Doha bargain.
“Our many engagements highlighted that the Taliban are not meeting the conditions of the February 2020 agreement in three key areas: making progress towards a peace agreement [with the Afghan government]; a broad reduction in violence; and a demonstrated will and capacity to prevent Al Qaeda and the Islamic State from using Afghanistan as a platform for terrorism,” said Joseph Dunford, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a co-chair of the Afghanistan Study Group, said at a February 3rd launch event for the report. “In our judgement the diminished terrorist threat in Afghanistan is due to U.S. trained and supported Afghan Security Forces who remain highly dependent on U.S. funding and operational support, and will for some time to come. We thus believe a U.S. troop withdrawal will provide terrorists with an opportunity to reconstitute. And in our judgement that reconstitution will take place within 18 to 36 months.”
That warning was bolstered last October when Afghan Special Forces killed top Al Qaeda propagandist Husam Abd al-Rauf, also known by the nom de guerre Abu Muhsin al-Masri, in Afghan territory controlled by the Taliban. Al Rauf was on the FBI’s most wanted terrorists list, and had served for years as Al Qaeda’s media chief. The Taliban’s Deputy Chief Sirajuddin Haqqani, leader of the deadly Haqqani Network that for many years has organized mass casualty suicide bombings in Kabul from its sanctuary in eastern Pakistan, has long had close ties to Al Qaeda, according to the FBI.
Far from agreeing to a ceasefire or tamping down violence, the Taliban launched major offensives last year in its old strongholds of Kandahar and Helmand Provinces. According to U.S. military officials, the guerillas have also begun to destroy bridges and other infrastructure along Afghanistan’s ring road to impede the ability of Afghan Security Forces to quickly reinforce besieged provincial capitals.
“The Taliban already has a number of provincial capitals surrounded and their attacks on the ring road are squeezing Kabul, where an operational network of suicide bombing cells is primed for a big operation – so once the last U.S. troops leave, taking their airpower with them, we expect major parts of Afghanistan to start going black very quickly,” said Tom Joscelyn, senior editor of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ “The Long War Journal,” which has tracked the conflict for many years.
“The problem with the ‘peace talks’ is they are premised on the pretense that the Taliban is interested in breaking with Al Qaeda and sharing power, which, as someone who has tracked the messaging and actions of Taliban leaders for 20 years is simply delusional,” he said. “They seek a return of their former Islamic Emirate where religious and political power are invested in a ‘caliph’ or ruler, who from the top down will impose their harsh interpretation of Islamic law. That’s the ideology that tens of thousands of Taliban fighters have been indoctrinated in, and the divine mission they are fighting for.”
Regional Counterterrorism Operations
The Biden administration has proposed that the United Nations convene regional neighbors for deliberations on the country’s future, in hopes of aligning their interests in a stable Afghanistan going forward. Yet for two decades the interests of Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, India and the United States have more often clashed violently on the issue of Afghanistan’s future.
Two decades of U.S. pressure — abetted by planeloads of cash — to get Pakistan to end its support and sanctuary of the Taliban have failed, for instance, and both Iran and Russia have supplied arms to the Taliban to inflict pain on the United States. Russia reportedly even offered the Taliban “bounties” for the killing of U.S. soldiers.
India has supported other factions inside Afghanistan as a way to thwart its intense regional rival Pakistan, and has recently engaged in deadly military skirmishes along its border with China. For its part, Beijing increasingly views relations with the United States as a zero sum game, and would welcome a U.S. retreat from its neighborhood. Aligning the strategic interests of so many disparate nations in time to cushion the exit of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan this fall seems unlikely.
U.S. officials see signs that Afghanistan’s neighbors are beginning to “hedge” against the likelihood of a return to civil war. That strategic hedging in the region could assist a “significant effort” now underway by U.S. officials to find nations in the region willing to host U.S. counterterrorism forces and critical assets such as armed unmanned drones and surveillance platforms. Countries that feel increasingly threatened by heightened violence and terrorism flowing from Afghanistan may view U.S. counterterrorism forces as a stabilizing presence.
Prime candidates are Uzbekistan, where the U.S. military formerly occupied Karshi-Khanabad (K2) airbase early in the conflict, and Kyrgyzstan, where U.S. forces were previously stationed at Manas airport. Another candidate is Pakistan, which has long facilitated the resupply of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, though its intelligence services’ close ties to the Taliban and fear of instability in Pakistan could complicate cooperation with U.S. military forces.
“I think the country that is going to be most affected by events in Afghanistan is going to be Pakistan, because of the possibility of an unconstrained refugee flow and the renewed threat of terrorist attacks into Pakistan ramping up as a result [of the U.S. military withdrawal],” General McKenzie said this week. “I think the countries to the north of Afghanistan such as Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan are also going to be worried about the flows of refugees and perhaps fighters to the north. All of them will see what happens after we leave, how the United States postures itself, and then they’ll decide what to do. They are going to face some tough choices.”
In his testimony, McKenzie made very clear that the closer U.S. counterterrorism forces and assets are to the terrorists they are tracking inside Afghanistan, the better. “We’re going to zero troops in Afghanistan, but we will be using a number of methods to continue monitor Al Qaeda and ISIS in Afghanistan. Our intelligence in that regard will decline; the director of the CIA has said as much. But we’ll still be able to see into Afghanistan,” McKenzie said, noting that the still undecided size of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul will play a role in determining the residual U.S. intelligence capability in-country. “But the president has made clear we’re not going to reenter or reoccupy Afghanistan under any circumstances. What we will continue to be able to do is to ‘find,’ and ‘fix’ those extremists who are planning attacks against the United States, and when appropriate we will strike them. But I don’t want to make that sound easy, because it won’t be. It will be extremely difficult to do. But it is not impossible to do it.”
No Good Choices
In rejecting the Afghanistan Study Group’s top recommendation of conditioning the U.S. troop withdrawal on changes in Taliban behavior, the Biden administration has essentially embraced an option outlined in the report as “A Calculated Military Withdrawal.” “The guiding logic of this pathway would be…to prepare for, or at least be willing to accept, an eventual Taliban ascendance,” the report concludes. “The drawbacks of selecting this option are obvious: the United States is highly unlikely to meet even a minimal definition of its interests, and Afghanistan is highly likely to fall into chaos. The human suffering that would be caused should a complex civil war erupt would be difficult to calculate, and would understandably be blamed on the United States.”
Ambassador James Dobbins is a former Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan for both the Bush 43 and Obama administrations, and a member of the Afghanistan Study Group. He cites the U.S. military withdrawal from Vietnam in the 1970s and the Soviet Red Army’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in the 1980s as cautionary tales. In each case the monetary and military support for allied governments in each country began to diminish once the troops came home, and the South Vietnamese and Afghan governments collapsed.
“It won’t happen right away, and there is likely to be what Henry Kissinger called ‘a decent interval,’ but when we pull the troops out it sends an explicit message that Afghanistan is not as important as it once was, and the U.S. government and Congress are naturally going to focus their attention and resources elsewhere,” Dobbins said in an interview. “So with enough financial support I think the Afghan government and security forces could stagger along, but in any power-sharing agreement I think the Taliban are likely to be ascendant. And while I won’t make predictions, I am concerned the situation could unravel quickly.”
In choosing to withdraw the last U.S. troops from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021, President Biden used symbolism to highlight the fact that America’s longest war began two decades earlier with the worst attack on the U.S. homeland since Pearl Harbor. Some who fought there worry that in the pantheon of Islamist extremists it will be twisted into a symbol of U.S. retreat, to be followed by a long-sought victory.
Retired Lt. Gen. David Barno once commanded all U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan. Both of his sons later served there. “When I look around the world I see thousands of U.S. troops still serving in Germany, Japan, and South Korea, all part of a pattern of the United States consolidating its strategic gains by keeping troops on the ground as a stabilizing force for many decades. I just think it is short-sighted not to similarly sustain our strategic investment in Afghanistan at the historically low cost of a few thousand troops, backed by our NATO allies,” said Barno, currently visiting professor of Strategic Studies at John Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies.
“I also think the Taliban will be emboldened by our leaving, and will see it not as an end to the war, but as the next phase in their push to retake the country. In that case the United States will be a bystander, just like we were in 2014 after prematurely pulling U.S. forces out of Iraq two years earlier, only to watch as ISIS nearly captured the country,” Barno added. “If that happens it’s conceivable we will be compelled to intervene once again in Afghanistan.”
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