Getting wrong the right way to get out of Afghanistan
Jeffrey A. Stacey
With President Biden nears a decision on whether to keep American forces in Afghanistan, the president should be listening to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his U.S. Central Command generals, rather than follow the Trump model of pressuring military leaders to withdrawal for political reasons — a move that would aid the foreign interests of Russia, China, Iran, and Pakistan.
America’s allies are fully united, alongside many congressional Republicans and Democrats back home, that the best way to get U.S. forces home is to broker a full-fledged peace treaty between the Afghan government and the Taliban terrorist force. To do this, the new Biden team needs to understand that, in Afghanistan, the cart actually needs to come before the horse.
In general, the presence of U.S. troops provides a major stabilizing force, not only because of the two standard tasks of supporting local forces in their engagement with enemies on top of training those forces, but also because the troops represent a political commitment from the United States — a kind of benign temporary planting of a flag, which despite conventional wisdom, actually deters local enemies more than motivating them.
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