Amid the highs and lows of Joe Biden’s presidency, one achievement stands out for both its importance and the lack of appreciation it has received. In August 2021, 20 years after U.S. troops first stepped foot in Afghanistan — and long after America’s vital national interests there had disappeared — Biden finally brought them home.
Of all his foreign policy decisions, few brought Biden more grief than the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan — and few were more courageous or essential.
By 2021, U.S. troops had been fighting and dying in Afghanistan for nearly 20 years. There were U.S. soldiers deployed to the country who were born after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which led the U.S.-led coalition to invade Afghanistan in 2001.
Though Biden oversaw the withdrawal of U.S. troops, he was implementing an agreement signed by his predecessor, President Donald Trump. The Doha Agreement, signed in February 2020 by Trump and representatives of the Taliban, required U.S. troops to leave the country by May 2021.
There was also a more critical and elemental reason to commence the withdrawal.
In April of that year, Biden announced he was deferring the final exit of U.S. troops by three months. But even after his military commanders urged the president to postpone the U.S. withdrawal further, Biden refused. Another delay ran the risk of renewed Taliban attacks on U.S. military targets, which had been suspended when the Afghan rebels signed the Doha Agreement.
But there was also a more critical and elemental reason to commence the withdrawal. As Biden noted in a farewell address on Monday touting his foreign policy record, “it was time to end the war and bring our troops home, and we did.”
With that act, Biden did something that eluded three previous American presidents.
In 2001, George W. Bush ordered the U.S. military to attack Al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Afghanistan. But he and his advisers gave little thought to what would come next. When the Taliban government rapidly collapsed in December 2001, the United States was both unprepared and largely uninterested in helping Afghanistan get back on its feet. The American military continued to target the remnants of the Taliban — most of whom had put down their weapons — and partnered with rapacious Afghan warlords, infuriating civilians caught in the crossfire.
As Bush devoted more and more of his attention to the war in Iraq, the Taliban began to reconstitute itself. By 2005-06, they had returned as an increasingly formidable insurgent force.
When President Barack Obama took office in 2009, pledging to devote more attention to Afghanistan, he had few ideas on how to win the war. Against the wishes of his vice president, Biden, Obama announced a 30,000-troop surge in December 2009.
Few of Obama’s advisers expected the surge to work — and it didn’t, because the United States had neither the interest nor the will for a long-term fight in Afghanistan. Yet for another decade, the United States kept troops in Afghanistan, bolstered an increasingly corrupt and ineffectual Afghan government and publicly claimed that success was possible. But as John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012, recently wrote in a searing indictment of this 20-year conflict, “they knew otherwise.”
Biden was the first president in 20 years to tell the American people the truth about the war.
In Sopko’s view, “self-serving delusion was America’s most formidable foe.” Three presidents and countless public officials, including members of the U.S. military, repeatedly told the American people that the American presence in Afghanistan was essential for U.S. national security. None of it was true.
Biden was the first president in 20 years to tell the American people the truth about the war. Even Trump, who signed the Doha Agreement, repeatedly blamed Biden for the withdrawal and downplayed his role in the deal that precipitated it.
As Biden said in August 2021, “the fundamental obligation of a president is to defend and protect America — not against threats of 2001, but against the threats of 2021 and tomorrow. … I simply do not believe that the safety and security of America is enhanced by continuing to deploy thousands of American troops and spending billions of dollars a year in Afghanistan.” He was right. The problem for Biden, of course, was that to many Americans the U.S. retreat looked like an ignominious disaster. As the withdrawal deadline approached, the Afghan government suddenly and completely collapsed. With the Taliban at the gates of Kabul in August 2021, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country — with no warning to U.S. officials (or to his own aides, who left the presidential palace for lunch and were shocked to discover upon their return that the president had disappeared). In the midst of an increasingly chaotic situation, ordinary Afghans overran the Kabul airport. Some were so desperate that they hung on to planes taking off from the runways, falling to their deaths. Later, a suicide bombing attack at Kabul airport by an ISIS-K terrorist killed more than 170 Afghans and 13 American soldiers. Biden’s poll numbers immediately faltered and never recovered. But there’s another part of the Afghan withdrawal that rarely gets mentioned. The collapse of the Afghan government turned what began as an evacuation effort into a massive humanitarian airlift. In less than three weeks, U.S. military commanders evacuated more than 125,000 people out of the country — both Americans and Afghans who had worked with U.S. officials during the war. It was the single largest noncombatant evacuation airlift in American history — and an extraordinary example of ingenuity and grit. Also largely forgotten now is the oft-repeated claim during 20 years of conflict: that if the United States left Afghanistan and the Taliban returned to power, Al Qaeda would return, re-establish a safe haven and put Americans at risk of a future terrorist attack. Yet last March, to little public fanfare, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its annual threat assessment and concluded that “al-Qa‘ida has reached an operational nadir in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” In September 2023, Christy Abizaid, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said Al Qaeda’s “revival is unlikely” in Afghanistan, in part because of the loss of an “accommodating local environment.” The singular justification for 20 years of war, $2 trillion in spending and the deaths of more than 2,500 American service members and over 100,000 Afghan troops and civilians was an untested and easily refutable assumption repeated over and over and over again by pundits, generals, armchair warriors and presidents of both parties. Joe Biden stopped that charade. He finally ended a pointless war, when his predecessors were unwilling and unable to do so. It stands out as one of his greatest achievements as president.
Michael A. Cohen is a political writer and a fellow with the Eurasia Group Foundation. 
