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Biden dispatched his top foreign and defense policy cabinet officers, Blinken and Austin, to the NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on March 23 and 24. The 36 NATO allies had nearly 10,000 troops left in Afghanistan. The U.S. contingent was the largest, at 3,500 troops. The allies had all shown firm commitment to the Afghanistan War over the last 20 years.

Genuinely listen and consult, Biden said. Robust working alliances were a tenet of Biden’s worldview.

For Biden, one of Trump’s worst mistakes was disparaging the NATO alliance and making it too much about nations’ financial contributions for defense.

At a closed door meeting, Blinken took notes for three hours.

“Here’s what I’m hearing, Mr. President,” he told Biden in a secure call that night from Brussels. It was not totally a surprise, but it was a jolt. He said he heard a blast “in quadraphonic sound,” which is surround sound. In other words, overwhelming. Blinken, a musician, had his own band, Coalition of the Willing, and played rock guitar.

The ministers’ preference, he told the president, is that the U.S. leverage the departure of its troops to gain concrete moves by the Taliban toward a political settlement. Ideally, negotiate the basic contours of a future Afghan state, a constitution, and reform. The ministers had wildly ambitious hopes and talked about elections, human rights, and the rights of women and girls.

Biden and Blinken were in a serious pinch.

Back in Washington, Blinken consulted with his staff and State Department experts. He then changed his recommendation. Previously, he had been foursquare with Biden for a full withdrawal. His new recommendation was to extend the mission with U.S. troops for a while to see if it could yield a political settlement. Buy time for negotiations.

Defense Secretary Austin also came up with a new proposal, a variation on the same theme. He proposed a middle ground. Instead of all or nothing, why not have a slow, “gated” withdrawal in three or four stages to provide leverage for diplomatic negotiations. The “gated” withdrawals also would offer time and space for the political process and a hedge if the diplomatic talks fell apart.

As the internal debate on what to do with the Afghanistan War continued, Biden and Jake Sullivan asked everyone to answer another basic question: What would be the best-case scenario if U.S. forces left?

Intelligence officials inside the CIA and military described a possible negotiated settlement between the Afghan government and the Taliban without large-scale, sustained fighting. Population centers, Kabul and Herat, would have relative peace and enjoy the stability gains made over the course of the past 20 years. The central government would have much less, if any, control elsewhere in the country. That was the best case, but no one suggested it was the most likely.

Biden and Sullivan also asked, what do you think Russia and China would do if the U.S. left?

Those powers would generally prefer the U.S. to stay, U.S. intelligence agencies reported. China and Russia reaped the benefit of comparative regional stability without the work or cost.

Then there were the worst-case scenarios. Austin, Milley and the intelligence officials presented a long list of downsides of withdrawal. Their forecast was bleak:

Biden asked, how much warning would we get of such terrorist capability? We should have six months warning, the intelligence officials said.

“We obviously can’t trust that we’ll have a full six months,” Biden said. “I want you to build an over-the-horizon capability,” referring to monitoring and attack capabilities from neighboring countries, “that allows us to suppress this and disrupt any reconstitution of Al Qaeda or other external plotting.”

Austin reminded everyone that being “over-the-horizon” still denied the military and the intelligence services the critical situational awareness on the ground that has been so central to U.S. capability.

The presentation on the worst case continued:

What about Pakistan? Biden asked. He considered Pakistan the most dangerous state in the region because of their nuclear weapons stockpile.

A Taliban takeover of Afghanistan could put wind in the sails of Tehrik-i-Taliban or TTP, the Pakistani Taliban. The TTP was an active, armed resistance to the Pakistani government and was blamed for the 2007 assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

The military leaders’ and intelligence officials’ warnings grew darker. They had spent decades tracking and studying the Taliban. They knew well what it would mean for the Afghan people, particularly women.

It was a stunning list of possible human disaster and political consequences.

Okay, Biden said, let’s talk through what tools we have available to us to reduce those possible consequences and risks.

If U.S. troops left, he said his goal, within six months, was to have sufficient capability in the Gulf region to respond to new problems without having U.S. forces based on the ground in Afghanistan. Then, the U.S. could continue to monitor terrorist targets in Afghanistan and have an accessible launching pad for U.S. military action to destroy them if necessary.

Sullivan and the NSC staff ultimately presented Biden with two memos: The strongest case for staying and the strongest case for leaving. The memos were based on the extensive interagency discussions. Equally important, if not more so, though, was Biden’s own history with Afghanistan.

In a 2015 interview, Russian president Vladimir Putin was asked if his 16 years in the KGB influenced him. Putin’s memorable answer: “Not a single stage of our life passes without a trace.”

The same could be said of Biden’s 20 years dealing with the Afghanistan War as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, eight years as vice president, and his many trips to the country.

It was much more than a stage of Biden’s life. Of particular significance was the three-month Afghanistan strategy review, which President Obama led in the first year of his presidency. As vice president, Biden participated in all the meetings, read the intelligence reports, and had a rare level of engagement in the policy review. Subtly and unsubtly, Biden let it be known that he thought few, if any, troops should be added.

The following year, 2010, Biden privately reviewed Obama’s eventual decision to add 30,000 U.S. troops. He characterized it as a tragic power play executed by national security leaders at the expense of a young president. Obama, Biden said, had been rolled by the military and the “five blocks of granite,” five key players at the time. The five were Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Michael Mullen, General David Petraeus, who was the Central Commander, and General Stanley McChrystal, the commander in Afghanistan.

McChrystal had written a classified assessment of the war saying there would be “mission failure” if he did not get tens of thousands more troops. He wanted 40,000 more. The four other blocks of granite—Clinton, Gates, Mullen and Petraeus—backed McChrystal.

Biden privately said if he were writing his memoirs, he would “accurately and concisely” state the problem he saw with the five’s position.

“I was making the case over and over and over and over again that the Taliban was not Al Qaeda,” Biden said. The insurgency was part of an internal civil war and not the terrorist group threatening the United States.

Biden recalled visiting Afghanistan while he was vice president-elect. He met with then–U.S. commander David McKiernan, who said they had not seen Al Qaeda in 18 months.

Biden said he then asked Secretary of Defense Gates, “Let me ask you a simple question. If there were no Al Qaeda, would we be spending 100 plus billion dollars sending tens of thousands of men and women to Afghanistan? The response was ‘yes.’ That was a crystallizing moment.”

Gates argued the large U.S. troop presence contributed to the strategic stability on the subcontinent.

Biden had said, “Those blocks of granite had as one of the basic premises upon which they were building their argument that in order to stabilize Pakistan, we had to demonstrate we were prepared to defeat the Taliban. It’s completely fucking illogical. They, the Pakistanis, created the goddamn Taliban. How are we solidifying Pakistan if we defeat the very people they created and continue to support?”

To back up the request of additional troops, the military had conducted a classified war game, “Poignant Vision,” that showed sending anything less than 40,000 more troops would be a disaster in the region.

Biden told Obama that the military was selling him “bullshit” on the war. Biden knew from his years in the Senate the military was burying Obama in jargon.

“It’s like the Catholic school kid. They teach you about confession and the priest. In third grade, when you’re learning to go to do penance. Now you can’t go in there and say I stole the gold chain and fail to tell the priest there was a gold watch at the end of the chain.”

That’s what the military leaders were doing, Biden said. “That’s how these guys are. You’ve got to find out if they’ve got a goddamn gold watch at the end of the chain.” He added, “A lot of this is new to the president,” who had been elected to the Senate in 2004 and served there for just four years before winning the White House.

“There were four or five of their principles that I thought were just absolutely built on sand,” Biden said.

One was to continue training the 400,000 Afghan security forces and police. But that would not guarantee an end to the counterinsurgency because the capacity of the U.S. troops was so much greater than that of the Afghan forces.

And if Afghan forces could never take control, the U.S. would be there forever. “The misrepresentation by omission constantly occurred,” Biden said.

Biden spent hours and hours sitting alone with Obama, often during their regular weekly lunch.

“They thought they were outsmarting everybody. They’re all over there having war games, but I was having lunch games.”

Biden was not alone in his view. When military leaders argued they also needed the platforms in Afghanistan for Predator drones, the remote piloted and armed aircraft, CIA director Leon Panetta said the drones could be run from other countries.

“Thank God for old Leon,” Biden said. “Leon basically speaks up and says, that’s not the way I see it.”

As the 2021 review was grinding on, Biden essentially agreed with Blinken that they had to make sure they had not unilaterally foreclosed a political settlement.

But a sense of dread was now pervading the review. The two sides of Biden were in conflict—get out or give negotiation every last opportunity.

As the military liked to say, “Every option is suboptimal.” Now Biden had to chose the least suboptimal.

“Don’t compare me to the Almighty,” Biden told Blinken, “compare me to the alternative.”