{"id":285432,"date":"2021-08-24T08:35:49","date_gmt":"2021-08-24T08:35:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobinmag.com\/2021\/08\/joe-biden-afghanistan-taliban-us-military-foreign-policy-pullout\/"},"modified":"2021-08-24T08:35:49","modified_gmt":"2021-08-24T08:35:49","slug":"joe-biden-was-right-to-pull-out-of-afghanistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/08\/24\/joe-biden-was-right-to-pull-out-of-afghanistan\/","title":{"rendered":"Joe Biden Was Right to Pull Out of Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

The US may not be completely ending its military adventure in Afghanistan, but Joe Biden\u2019s decision to pull out troops is a victory for democracy over national security authoritarianism.<\/h3>\n\n\n
\n \n
\n President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the US military\u2019s ongoing evacuation efforts in Afghanistan at the White House in Washington DC, 2021. (Anna Moneymaker \/ Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

Joe Biden is taking it from all sides these days. Everyone seems to be unhappy with his withdrawal from Afghanistan, from the former president<\/a> who signed the framework for it and the British warmongers<\/a> who hoped<\/a> to piggyback on the US war indefinitely, to the mainstream press<\/a> that has otherwise been more lapdog than watchdog the past seven months and the top Democrats<\/a> who have joined<\/a> the harsh Republican attacks<\/a> on the pullout.<\/p>\n

Too bad for them, because in this case, Biden is right, and they are wrong. Watching the establishment froth at the mouth at the fact that this pointless<\/a>, appalling<\/a> war is finally ending \u2014 and the drop in support for boththe pullout<\/a> and the administration<\/a> that\u2019s come with it \u2014 is as good an illustration as you\u2019re going to get of just how politically courageous the president\u2019s decision to withdraw and stick to his guns has been.<\/p>\n

This website isn\u2019t in the habit of giving the Biden White House false or undeserved credit. Though in some respects better than anyone could have expected given the president\u2019s past career, the administration\u2019s record so far has fallen far short in a variety\u00a0 areas, from its handling of the pandemic<\/a> and plans<\/a> for economic recovery<\/a> to its Trump-like response to immigration<\/a> and climate change<\/a>. But with this decision, Biden has done what the last three presidents have talked about doing but ultimately shied away from, and in the process has broken with not just the hulking inertia of US national security policy, but his own historical <\/a>\u00a0shortcomings<\/a> as a politician.<\/p>\n

No one that mattered wanted this: not the military contractors who got fat off the budgetary worm hole the conflict became, not the generals who did everything they could to trick and manipulate<\/a> every new president into staying, nor the politicians who, when push came to shove, didn\u2019t have the appetite to stand up to either. The withdrawal can be justified on these grounds alone, for showing that an elected president can actually defy a collection of powerful, institutionalized forces arrayed against a policy.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s also justified by the fact that, just by leaving the country and simply not doing anything<\/i>, the US pullout will contribute more to global peace and security than any of its dubiously labeled \u201chumanitarian interventions\u201d have over the past few decades. There is now underway what seems to be a concerted effort to block out memory of the last twenty years of this war, which have not been good for human rights<\/a>, and have barely led to any progress<\/a> for most of the country\u2019s women<\/a>. It cannot be stressed enough that the brutal reality of foreign occupation and the government it propped up is what allowed the Taliban to roar back stronger than they were two decades ago.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean Biden can\u2019t be criticized. The US evacuation of its Afghan allies, those directly at risk from reprisal in the case of a Taliban takeover, had been scandalously slow<\/a> and callous<\/a> for quite a while before the Afghan government finally collapsed and left Biden\u2019s plans in tatters<\/a>. While some degree of chaos was probably unavoidable, there are very real and fair criticisms to be made of the planning for withdrawal.<\/p>\n

We should also have no illusions about what this pullout actually means. As Biden made clear in his major speech<\/a> last week and to ABC\u2019s George Stephanopoulos<\/a>, the resources sunk into Afghanistan will now be redirected into an expanded \u201cwar on terror\u201d that will target Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and other \u201cmultiple countries in Africa and Asia.\u201d<\/p>\n

And while the US occupation of Afghanistan<\/i> is over, with all the very real and symbolic ramifications that has for both the country and the US political situation, the war on Afghanistan<\/i> will continue, as Biden had promised<\/a>. The president has pledged to keep using the Pentagon\u2019s \u201ccounterterrorism over-the-horizon capability\u201d in the country: in other words, ongoing special forces raids, bombings, and airstrikes that violate the country\u2019s sovereignty and will keep accidentally killing its people.<\/p>\n

So the brutal and counterproductive nature of US foreign policy shows no sign of being dislodged. But the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which will fade from our daily thoughts once the jangling keys of another country\u2019s national crisis become the focus of Washington war lust (remember Cuba?<\/a>), may at least provide the opening to have that conversation, especially as the other two-decade-long \u201cwar\u201d on terrorism has proved a similar failure as Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

For all its flaws, the Afghanistan withdrawal could be a transformational moment in US political culture, helping to solidify in the public mind the stark limits of US power<\/a>, and accelerate the country\u2019s slow turn away from endless foreign meddling and toward the many alarming crises it has left festering at home. And it\u2019s a flat reassertion that at the end of the day, the ones who call the shots \u2014 even in the especially undemocratic<\/a> field of US foreign policy \u2014 aren\u2019t unelected generals and faceless bureaucrats, but the civilian leaders in whom American voters place their trust to do what they ask for.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n\n\n

This post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joe Biden is taking it from all sides these days. Everyone seems to be unhappy with his withdrawal from Afghanistan, from the former president who signed the framework for it and the British warmongers who hoped to piggyback on the US war indefinitely, to the mainstream press that has otherwise been more lapdog than watchdog [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1445,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285432"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1445"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285432"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":285433,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285432\/revisions\/285433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}