The specter of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 is now hovering over the 2024 presidential campaign. Donald Trump, with some family members of the service members killed by the ISIS-K attack during the U.S. withdrawal, recently commemorated its third anniversary at Arlington Cemetery in Virginia. In his new book, H.R. McMaster, the former Trump administration national security adviser, asserted that Trump bears some of the blame for the chaotic pull-out. Although that is correct, a blame game over who is culpable for the messy withdrawal distorts clear thinking about the legacy of the war.
McMaster, in an interview with CNN on his new book, criticized Trump for signing an agreement with the Taliban, pledging to withdraw U.S. forces by May 2021. After taking office, President Biden decided that such a rapid withdrawal was not feasible because it might endanger U.S. forces. Withdrawal under fire from any military operation is a risky action since troops are especially vulnerable to attack, and the adversary has an incentive to strike to showcase that its efforts and strength motivated their pull out. Therefore, Biden moved Trump’s agreed date of removal back from May to September 2021.
That doesn’t mean that mistakes weren’t made. However, the creaky Afghan government came crashing down more rapidly than even the Biden administration had anticipated. The Taliban, knowing that the United States was pulling out, negotiated with local governments and arranged in advance for their surrender, unbeknownst to U.S. intelligence. American plans for a more orderly and graceful withdrawal were thus shattered.
But the chaos doesn’t mean that withdrawal was the wrong decision, as McMaster implies in the CNN interview. If McMaster and the U.S. military had had their way, the United States would still be bogged down in an Afghan quagmire that would now be in its third decade, supporting a non-viable Afghan government indefinitely.
Instead of trading blame over a disastrous withdrawal, maybe candidates Trump and Harris should instead claim credit for having the courage to do what George W. Bush and Barack Obama couldn’t bring themselves to do—cut their losses from a failed war that, in the end, killed a staggering 176,206 people, including 2,324 U.S. military personnel, 3,923 U.S. support personnel, 1,144 allied troops, 69,095 Afghan forces, and 46,319 Afghan civilians, and cost the U.S. taxpayers more than $2.3 trillion.
And if blame is assessed, it should rest with George W. Bush, who claimed during the 2000 presidential campaign that he would not seek to nation-build and then did just that in Afghanistan and Iraq—instead of pursuing narrower, more feasible objectives like killing Osama bin Laden and crushing Al Qaeda. Barack Obama demonstrated how the war on Al Qaeda should have been conducted from the outset through good intelligence and Special Forces raids, like the one that killed bin Laden, without a long-term military footprint.
Political campaigns often distort issues to the point of incoherence. Instead of engaging in a blame game over the chaos and tragic killing of thirteen service personnel and 170 Afghans during the withdrawal, the two candidates should celebrate the courage of their administrations to end an endless war that would have likely claimed many more lives if it had continued. Any blame should be directed at the Bush administration, which started and continued the futile nation-building effort, and the Obama administration, which continued along the same track even after Bin Laden had been killed. But, then again, political campaigns have never been concerned with accurate assessments of past administrations.
Ivan R. Eland is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute and Director of the Independent Institute’s Center on Peace & Liberty. He is the author of War and the Rogue Presidency. He tweets at @Ivan_Eland.
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