Since 2001, each president has faced an evolving mission in Afghanistan, resulting in tens of thousands of American and Afghan casualties, frustratingly futile attempts to improve the country’s political leadership, and a Taliban that is he stubbornly denied defeat.
Biden explained his decision to withdraw all US troops as a necessary option for a war whose purpose had been blurred, adding that it was set in motion by an agreement with the Taliban made by President Donald Trump. . The chaos that ensued in the evacuation of Americans and Afghans who aided the war effort was a predictable and above all inevitable outcome, he said last week.
Still, the scenes of the hasty exits from Kabul and the capture of the country by the Taliban have proved profoundly humiliating for a global superpower that spent billions of dollars and lost thousands of lives in its efforts.
The way the United States spent 20 years in Afghanistan, only for the Taliban to regain control when they withdraw their troops, will be an issue that historians will have to ponder for decades. And whoever takes responsibility is a complicated debate.
This is how each president has focused on what became America’s longest war:
George W. Bush
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which were plotted by Al Qaeda from the bases of Afghanistan, President George W. Bush promised to eliminate global terrorism. He called on the Taliban, who controlled most of Afghanistan, to hand over al-Qaeda leaders hiding in the country, including Osama bin Laden.
When the Taliban rejected this call, it adopted a war footing. On September 18, 2001, Congress authorized U.S. forces to prosecute those responsible for 9/11, although lawmakers have never explicitly voted to declare war on Afghanistan. Bush, in statements at a joint session of Congress two days later, acknowledged that the coming conflict would mean “a long campaign unlike any we have ever seen.”
Still, even Bush could not have predicted how long the war would last.
On October 7, 2001, the United States Army officially launched Operation Enduring Freedom, with the support of the United Kingdom. The first phase of the war consisted mainly of airstrikes against al-Qaeda targets and the Taliban. But in November there were 1,300 American troops in the country.
That number steadily increased over the next few months as U.S. and Afghan forces overthrew the Taliban government and went after Bin Laden, who was hiding in the Tora Bora cave complex in southeastern Kabul. . Bin Laden finally crossed the border into Pakistan.
In the coming months and years we would see Bush send thousands more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to fetch Taliban insurgents. In May 2003, the Pentagon said major fighting in Afghanistan was over. The focus for the U.S. and its international partners focused on rebuilding the country and installing a Western-style democratic political system.
Many of the Taliban’s restrictions disappeared and thousands of girls and women were allowed to attend school and take care of themselves. But the still corrupt government in Afghanistan frustrated U.S. officials. And the Taliban began a resurgence.
At the same time, the focus shifted from Washington to another war, this time in Iraq, which undermined Afghanistan’s military resources and attention. When Bush was re-elected in 2004, troop levels in Afghanistan had reached 20,000, although oversight and attention were more clearly directed at what was sweating in Iraq.
In the following years we will see steady increases in U.S. forces deployed in Afghanistan as the Taliban regains ground in rural southern areas. When Bush left office in 2009, there were more than 30,000 U.S. soldiers stationed there, and the Taliban were organizing a full-blown insurgency.
barack Obama
When he entered the White House in 2009, President Barack Obama faced a decision on a war he inherited from Bush. Leading generals recommended a “rise” in troop levels to weaken the Taliban, who were carrying out attacks on an intensified clip.
After a grueling internal debate, during which then-Vice President Biden voiced his opposition to the increase, Obama began deploying tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan. At the same time, he pledged a withdrawal schedule that would begin withdrawing troops in 2011 and insisted on rules to measure progress in the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
Obama said in a televised speech that additional U.S. troops “would help create the conditions for the United States to transfer responsibility to the Afghans.” But later, aides said Obama felt jammed by military commanders pushing a counterinsurgency strategy.
In August 2010, U.S. forces in Afghanistan reached 100,000. But it was in a different country – Pakistan – that U.S. intelligence located Bin Laden, who was killed during a Navy SEAL raid in May 2011. Shortly afterwards, Obama announced that he would begin carrying the U.S. troops at home with the goal of releasing them from security responsibilities to Afghans in 2014.
Over the following years, troop levels steadily declined as the United States was in full diplomacy with the leaders of Afghanistan. At the start of his second term, Obama had adopted a vision of the country summed up by members of his team as “Afghan enough,” a recognition that attempts to cultivate a Western-style democracy were mostly desperate and that terrorists and keep the controlled Taliban equated to the limits of the role of the United States.
Obama announced the end of major combat operations on December 31, 2014, with the United States on a mission to train and assist Afghan security forces. More troop drops put the United States on the verge of withdrawing completely when Obama leaves office.
But a year later, when his term was about to end, Obama determined that the fragile security situation in the country meant that the total withdrawal he hoped for was not feasible. He left office with just under 10,000 troops in the country and said it was up to his successor to decide what to do next.
Donald Trump
As a candidate, Trump promised to bring American troops home from Afghanistan. But fulfilling his promise proved difficult as the Taliban continued to rise and an Islamic State affiliate emerged.
In his first major decision in Afghanistan, Trump outsourced the authority of troops to the Pentagon. His team was divided along ideological lines, between his military advisers advocating a continued presence and more staunch nationalists opposing foreign interventions.
Finally, Trump admitted in an August 2017 speech that while his instinct had been to withdraw all U.S. troops, conditions made it impossible. He left the future of the American presence there open, rejecting a timetable for withdrawal and instead insisting that “conditions on the ground” would dictate any decision-making.
A year later, Trump commissioned Zalmay Khalilzad, an experienced Afghan Afghan diplomat, to lead negotiations with the Taliban to end the war. The talks largely ruled out the Afghan government, pushing a wedge between the U.S. and President Ashraf Ghani.
Meanwhile, the Taliban continued to carry out a series of terrorist attacks, including in Kabul, which killed dozens of civilians. Even after Trump invited and then canceled peace talks with the group to be held at Camp David in 2019, discussions continued with Khalilzad.
An agreement was reached in February 2020 that set the course for a total withdrawal from the United States in exchange for Taliban guarantees that it would reduce violence and sever ties with terrorist groups. But there were no measures to fulfill those promises, which the Pentagon said they failed to fulfill.
Even when American troops began to march, the Taliban gained strength. And the May 2021 deadline to withdraw all U.S. troops was finally passed to Trump’s successor.
Joe Biden
Even before taking office in January, Biden had begun to weigh what to do in Afghanistan, where he had long been disillusioned with war efforts. After receiving his advice to withdraw the American troops rejected by Obama, Biden was finally able to put an end to what he had come to see as a pointless war.
During the first months of his presidency, Biden received advice from his national security team, including “clear-eyed” warnings that withdrawing all U.S. troops could lead to the eventual collapse of the US government. Afghanistan and the Taliban capture.
By contrast, staying in the country after the May deadline set in Trump’s deal with the Taliban would expose U.S. troops to attacks.
Ultimately, Biden announced that the remaining 2,500 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan would return home on September 11, 2021, 20 years after the terrorist attacks that sparked the war in the first place. Biden said it was clear that the goals of the United States had been met and that his country could do nothing more to build Afghanistan in a stable democracy.
The chronology eventually accelerated as the Pentagon worked to draw forces more quickly. On July 2, the United States handed over Bagram airfield, a symbol of U.S. military power, to Afghan forces. Meanwhile, the Taliban were taking the provincial capitals, often without any resistance from the Afghan army.
On August 15, the Taliban returned to power in Kabul after Ghani fled the country, a collapse that U.S. officials said frankly happened much faster than they anticipated.
The U.S. and its allies embarked on a hasty mission to evacuate Afghan citizens and allies who had helped during the war effort and feared reprisals from militants.
Biden sent 6,000 U.S. troops back to the country to secure Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport and facilitate air transportation. But there is still a new deadline, August 31, for these troops to leave.
The Taliban have called it a red line. And now Biden is facing another decision on whether to expand or not: a version of his original choice made in April.
