WASHINGTON – The two previous presidents of the United States declared that they wanted to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan, and both decided in the end that they could not do so.
Now President Biden is facing the same problem, with a deadline of less than three months.
The Pentagon, unsure of what the new commander-in-chief will do, is preparing variations on a plan to stay, a plan to leave and a plan to withdraw very, very slowly – a reflection of the debate now revolving around the White House. The current deadline is May 1, according to a widely violated peace agreement that provides for the complete withdrawal of the remaining 2,500 American forces.
The deadline is a critical turning point for Biden, and will take place months before the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that led to the American-led invasion of Afghanistan to eradicate Al Qaeda.
Two decades later, strategic goals have changed many times, from counterterrorism and democratization to nation building, and much more limited goals that President Barack Obama’s administration has called “Afghan good enough”. Biden – who defended as vice president for the entire term of Obama for a minimal presence – will have to decide whether to follow his instincts to leave would be a very high risk of a Taliban takeover of the country’s main cities.
Biden, noted a senior aide, began his long career in the Senate shortly before the United States evacuated its people from Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam; the image of helicopters tearing Americans and some Vietnamese off a roof was a striking symbol of a failed strategy. Biden is well aware of the risks of something similar happening in Kabul, the Afghan capital, if all Western troops leave, and he described the possibility in particular as frightening, advisers said.
But the president also questions whether the small remaining contingent of Americans can do anything after 20 years in which almost 800,000 American soldiers have been deployed, or whether it will ever be possible to bring them home.
Biden kept Zalmay Khalilzad, the longtime diplomat who negotiated the peace deal with President Donald J. Trump, in the hope of continuing negotiations with the Taliban and the Afghan government. But key advisers on the issue are Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan – along with Jon Finer, Sullivan’s deputy.
Apparently, Mr. Biden will be guided by his own experience and has not yet made a decision. The allies will be looking for some nominations at a NATO summit that begins on Wednesday, although Biden’s advisers say they are not rushing a critical decision.
“We are conducting a rigorous review of the situation we have inherited, including all relevant options and with full consideration of the consequences of any potential course of action,” said Emily J. Horne, spokesman for the National Security Council. “It would be wrong for anyone to assume the outcome of this process at this time.”
At the same time, the Taliban and the Afghan government are preparing for a violent spring. Government officials last week began discussing how to proceed with the Afghan authorities that Trump left out of his Taliban deal.
One option under consideration, advisers said, would be to extend the May 1 withdrawal deadline by six months to give all sides more time to decide how to proceed. But it is not clear whether the Taliban would agree – or whether Biden would agree.
At the center of decision-making is a new American president who has had to wait for 20 years while other leaders ignored his advice on Afghanistan and committed a large number of American troops in a war effort there, ignoring his argument that all states United States needed an optimized and focused counterterrorism presence.
The decision is more difficult because if Biden decides to withdraw, he will have some responsibility – and much of the blame – if there is a collapse of the elected Afghan government for which American troops and their NATO allies fought and died and spent billions of dollars supporting .
In the panoply of foreign policy decisions facing the president, he and his national security advisers do not see Afghanistan as the most far-reaching. The right relationship with China is much more important to American prosperity. Fulfilling Biden’s promise not to let Russia overrun the United States is more important to his security. The Iranian nuclear program weighs on calculations from the Middle East. Afghanistan is deeply personal to him, and the most influential voice the president will hear may be his.
“His head is more at stake because he has been connecting with these people around the world for years,” said Brian Katulis, a senior member of the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank with close ties to the Biden government.
Katulis remembers meeting Biden at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan in 2008, when the president was a senator visiting the country as part of a Congressional tour with his colleagues John Kerry, who would become Secretary of State, and Chuck Hagel , who would become secretary of defense. It was midnight at the hotel’s executive club, Katulis recalled, and Biden wanted to chat in South Asia. For two hours.
“He was just energized by this problem,” said Katulis.
The May 1 deadline, enshrined in a peace agreement reached with the Taliban almost a year ago, will be the focus of the meeting in Brussels this week of allied defense ministers, including defense secretary Lloyd J. Austin III. There are now more than twice as many NATO allied soldiers in Afghanistan as Americans, and while assessing their own commitment to the country, they seek out Biden and Austin as a roadmap.
The president is already being pressured by the same voices that, for the past 20 years, have advocated maintaining at least a limited troop presence in Afghanistan.
In December, before Biden’s inauguration, the bipartisan Afghan Study Group, appointed by Congress, headed by the United States Institute of Peace, met with its foreign policy advisers to inform them of a report on Afghanistan. The report, which was released on February 3, argued, in essence, for abandoning the May 1 calendar, saying that the Taliban had not met the conditions for a US withdrawal set out in the Trump-Taliban agreement.
The group said reducing the troops to zero, as advocated by the Trump-Taliban agreement, would lead to civil war, delay American interests in the region and render useless the sacrifice of 3,500 coalition soldiers killed during the American-led war effort in Afghanistan. .
John F. Kirby, the Pentagon’s new press secretary, insisted that the Biden government was keeping the agreement, with its commitment to a total withdrawal of troops, but expressed pessimism that the Taliban would do what it should: Cut ties with Al Qaeda and reducing violence.
“Without them fulfilling their commitments to renounce terrorism and prevent violent attacks against Afghanistan’s National Security Forces, it is very difficult to see a specific path to the negotiated settlement,” said Kirby. “But we are still committed to that.”
But that was the Pentagon’s standard line, even during the Trump administration. What is not clear at this point is where Biden fits the spectrum.
When he was vice president, he fought against Pentagon leaders to urge his boss, Obama, to limit the number of American soldiers in Afghanistan.
“Joe and a considerable number of NSC officials,” wrote Obama in his memoirs, “A Promised Land,” saw a proposal by General Stanley A. McChrystal to send tens of thousands of soldiers to the country “as just the latest attempt. of an unbridled military man dragging the country even deeper into a futile and extremely expensive exercise in national construction, when we could and should be closely focused on counterterrorism efforts ”.
Although Biden lost the discussion in 2009, Obama took his position at the end of his presidency after hundreds of Americans and allied soldiers were killed and the gains from the increase were lost mainly to the Taliban.
Now, Biden must decide whether it is possible to defeat terrorist groups even without the physical presence of troops. Aides say he is fully aware that most Americans are tired of the war and doubts that continuing to spend, on blood and treasures, will achieve anything. And Afghanistan, without a doubt, has retreated in public consciousness.
For Biden, this could change the instant that Afghanistan is used again as a base to launch another terrorist attack against the United States or Western targets. For example, he just needs to look at Iraq and the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which followed Obama’s withdrawal from American troops in 2011, after the end of the combat mission there.
Critics say the Taliban has yet to commit to cutting ties with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups that threaten the United States, as the February 2020 agreement required.
In addition, some analysts say the Taliban, supported by triumphs on the battlefield and success at the negotiating table in Qatar, in securing the release of more than 5,000 prisoners, remains confident that it can wait for the end of the new government and has little incentive to make concessions.
Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., a retired four-star navy general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who helped lead the Afghan Study Group, said the United States still has influence. General Dunford, a former Afghan commander, said that in addition to increasing pressure on the battlefield, the Taliban want international recognition as a legitimate political movement and a relief to punish economic sanctions.
One option that is gaining momentum among some former diplomats and experts in Afghanistan is for Washington, working with its allies, to negotiate a one-month extension of the troop withdrawal deadline. This would give the new government time to step up peace talks in Qatar; gather support from other states in the region, including Pakistan; and conduct a new assessment of the future threat of terrorism in Afghanistan.
“It won’t be easy, but it is feasible,” said Laurel E. Miller, a former State Department official who worked on diplomacy in Afghanistan and Pakistan for Obama and Trump. “The Taliban has an interest in keeping the process going because the process has worked for them.”
If that approach fails, however, the Taliban has threatened to resume attacks on Americans and other NATO forces if the United States unilaterally decides to keep its 2,500 troops in the country beyond the May deadline. American forces are now deployed at about a dozen bases and carry out two main missions: counterterrorism operations and advising Afghan security forces at various headquarters.
Preparing for the possibility of new attacks against Americans, the Armed Forces Central Command has been ordered to devise a wide range of options to cover the permanence or departure of troops and to contain even higher levels of Taliban violence, officials said. Pentagon.
The government could, for example, temporarily increase the number of soldiers in the country, reversing Trump’s order to cut off forces in the last weeks of his term. This could be politically risky for Biden as he seeks to pass higher-priority legislation, such as pandemic relief, in Congress.
Another option would be to increase the number of American air strikes against Taliban targets across the country, such as fighters that threaten large Afghan cities, such as Kabul and Kandahar. This may require sending more attack aircraft to land at bases in the Middle East or ensuring that an aircraft carrier with its attack wing is operating in the Persian Gulf region, military officials said.
Kelly A. Ayotte, a former Republican senator from New Hampshire and another leader of the Afghanistan commission mandated by Congress, summed up the sentiment not only of panel members, but of many government officials.
“It’s not if we leave,” she said, “but that’s how we leave.”