SIXTY
On Wednesday, February 3, Biden called together his national security team to begin a comprehensive review of the 20-year war in Afghanistan.
Biden wanted to make a big move: terminate the endless war. It would put his stamp on American foreign policy. He had strongly opposed large numbers of U.S. troops in Afghanistan since he was Obama’s vice president. But he had not been the decision maker then. Now he was.
He knew the men and women of his foreign policy team sitting before him, most very well. Many were veterans of the Obama administration. As a group, they largely disdained Trump’s foreign policy process, dismissing it as incoherent, amateurish and unnecessarily isolationist. Drawing on their muscle memory, they were determined to revive and restore the traditional foreign policy procedures and systems of the Obama years.
“Look,” Biden told them, “I’m going to give it to you straight, where I’m at.” He reminded them he had been a longtime skeptic, even a cynic, about staying in the war, which began after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the U.S.
But he promised, “I’m here to listen.” He said he had asked Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, to run a full review and to be the honest broker, leaving no stone unturned, and making sure everyone and every argument was heard. A full and fair debate might help prevent leaks during the process because each person could make their case to Biden and not feel the urge to go public to be heard.
Biden added, “I absolutely want to hear arguments to the contrary and I’m going to keep an open mind about this because if there is a compelling reason to stay, I will certainly consider it and listen to it.”
Trump had announced a May 1, 2021, withdrawal of all U.S. troops, but Biden wanted to make his own decision on his own timetable.
Longtime Biden aides like Secretary of State Blinken and chief of staff Klain knew Biden was determined to bring all the troops home. He had wanted out, ever since 2009 when he believed the military and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had boxed in and overwhelmed President Obama in his first year. They insisted that Obama add tens of thousands of U.S. troops to the Afghanistan mission. Their resistance to any other option was so great, and often public, that Obama, who had little foreign policy or military experience, almost had no other choice.
Robert Gates, President George W. Bush’s defense secretary whom Obama unexpectedly had asked to stay on, had hinted he might resign if Obama failed to approve more troops. Obama believed he could not afford to lose such an established national security figure.
Blinken even had heard Biden privately say in 2009 that the United States had to accept a brutal civil war if U.S. troops withdrew. “How bad can that be?” Biden had asked. Pressed on whether a civil war would break out among the ethnic Pashtuns, who make up nearly half the Afghanistan population, Biden had almost jumped in his chair.
“Bingo. Bingo, bingo, bingo!” he said confidently, grimly repeating one of his favorite expressions.
Biden had made his opposition known at the time to Obama, as well as his disenchantment with how he believed the military had manipulated the president. Biden told others privately in 2009, “The military doesn’t fuck around with me,” more than implying they had with Obama.
Now in the 2021 review, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who knew Biden from the Obama years, told his staff that given Biden’s strong feeling, American participation in the war would almost certainly be ending. But he believed there were strong military, intelligence and strategic arguments for keeping a small U.S. force there.
The first Black defense secretary, Austin was a 1975 West Point graduate from Georgia who had served in the Army for four decades. In 2009, he had been director of the Joint Staff, a key senior three-star post, during Obama’s initial Afghanistan review when he became familiar with Biden’s attitudes. The following year, the two men became even more entwined. Austin had been sent to Iraq as the commanding general of U.S. forces of Iraq in 2010 when Obama had asked Biden to oversee the withdrawal of most U.S. troops. Major Beau Biden was a lawyer on Austin’s staff, and the major and the general got to know each other.
Biden and Austin were as steeped in the Afghanistan War history as anyone.
Thus began, over the next two months, an extraordinary series of 25 NSC meetings, large group and small group, one-on-one meetings with Biden, and meetings with his top advisers and cabinet members. Separate meetings of the NSC deputies and principals also were held without Biden. It was one of the most wide-ranging policy reviews ever held.
Emotional and contentious at times, the president seemed to want more certainty and clearer solutions than could be offered. Biden could be prickly and impatient. One top adviser found him almost impossible to work with, as Biden pressed for more detail and intelligence estimates.
Others thought the review was a textbook example of how foreign policy decisions should be made.
Biden’s primary argument, the one that undergirded the debate, was that the mission had shifted from its original intent.
The war had been launched by President George W. Bush in October 2001 to root out the Al Qaeda terrorist organization responsible for the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon.
The mission was to stop further attacks. But the war had expanded to a nation-building enterprise to defeat the religiously extreme Taliban, which had given Al Qaeda a safe haven to plot and stage attacks. The Taliban had ruthlessly ruled Afghanistan for five years before September 11, 2001. The hardline regime imposed Islamic law, oppressed women, and destroyed cultural sites, including sixth-century Buddhas which they regarded as forbidden religious idols.
A counterinsurgency effort called COIN grew to include not just defeating the Taliban but protecting the Afghan population and government. At one point, some U.S. military leaders hoped to have a platoon on every street corner in the capital of Kabul. At the height of the war a decade ago, the U.S. had 98,000 troops in Afghanistan. That number had dwindled in 2021 to 3,500, including regular and Special Operations forces.
Lingering over the whole Biden review was the basic question: What is the mission?
Biden had a particular disdain for counterinsurgency, viewing it as a classic example of mission creep.
“Our mission is to stop Afghanistan from being a base for attacking the homeland and U.S. allies by Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups, not to deliver a death blow to the Taliban,” Biden said, reminding everyone of the war’s original intent.
Simply put, for him the war had become a battle between the Afghan government and the Taliban. The U.S. military should have no part in a civil war in another country and needed to bring U.S. troops home, Biden told advisers.
As a preliminary step in the Sullivan-run policy review, Biden wanted answers to a few questions that deeply reflected his predisposition. As a practical matter, if at least one of them could not be answered positively, they had to face the reality that the U.S. troops had no attainable mission.
“One, do we believe that our presence in Afghanistan is fundamentally contributing to a significantly higher likelihood of a durable, negotiated political settlement between the Afghan government and the Taliban?
“Two, do we believe that the nature of the Al Qaeda and ISIS threat from Afghanistan is such that we have to keep thousands of troops on the ground there indefinitely?
“Three, if we go beyond the May 1 deadline and say we’re just staying on an open-ended basis, what is the risk to the force and risk to the mission? And will I have to flow more forces back into Afghanistan?”
As part of the negotiated May 1 deadline with the Trump administration, the Taliban had agreed not to attack U.S. troops. There had been no attacks for one year. But, intelligence showed, they surely would resume if Biden decided to keep U.S. troops indefinitely.
He also said he wanted them to examine, in depth, the humanitarian consequences for the civilian population of Afghanistan if U.S. troops were withdrawn.
Sullivan privately said, “Being the president of the United States and making a decision like this you have to stare in the face the human and potential human costs of your decision.”
In his 2020 memoir, A Promised Land, Obama recounted Biden’s advice during the Afghanistan policy review the first year of Obama’s presidency: “Listen to me, boss. Maybe I’ve been around this town for too long, but one thing I know is when these generals are trying to box in a new president.” Biden brought his face a few inches from Obama’s and stage-whispered, “Don’t let them jam you.”
Biden was now determined not to be jammed.
Over the course of the two months of meetings and private discussions in the Sullivan review, the Pentagon eventually laid out two main options. Secretary Austin said Biden could either execute an orderly withdrawal of all troops as quickly and safely as possible or he could approve an indefinite U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan.
U.S. troops were providing important coordination of surveillance and intelligence that helped stabilize the Afghan government of Ashraf Ghani, an academic who had been president of Afghanistan for six years. Austin said the U.S. presence also provided a situational awareness they could not get without being there. Being on the scene, on the ground, could make all the difference in early detection of a problem.
During the Sullivan process, Biden remarked, “If the mission is to preserve the Ghani government, I would not send my own son.”
It was a sensitive issue. The president made several other references to his late son, Beau, as a benchmark for determining whether the mission was worthwhile and necessary.
Biden was the first U.S. president in decades to have had a child serve in a war zone, and Beau’s experience seemed to heighten Joe Biden’s sense of sacrifice and risk.
If the U.S. stayed, the intelligence forecast was that the Taliban would resume their attacks. Should that happen, Biden said he probably would be asked to send still more troops. “If we have 3,000 troops there and they’re attacked, you guys”—he pointed to Austin and Milley—“will come in and say okay, we need 5,000 more.”
That was the cycle he wanted to avoid. A troop presence became a magnet for more troops because the military leaders naturally would want to protect their own force. And the answer, not surprisingly, was always more troops.
Sullivan concluded that meant the question was not whether to stay or leave, but whether to add more troops or leave.
That gave powerful argument to getting out because it was crystal clear that Biden was not going to add more troops. That was not even an option.