Why did the USA withdraw its military forces from Afghanistan?
This might have simply been a mistake. There is no need to imagine this was some bold paradigm shift of USA foreign policy.
Sarah Chayes has written the best book about corruption in Afghanistan, and how the USA’s tolerance of that corruption undermines everything that the USA wanted to accomplish there. We already spent several days reviewing her work, focusing on the principle of command responsibility and how it applies to America’s empire, and there was the shocking way that the leadership in Washington felt that corruption was a side-show and a distraction from the goal of establishing stability, and the great degree to which the CIA operates as a rogue agency that undermines the goals of the USA. I strongly recommend her book for anyone who wants to understand why the USA continues to fail to build stable democracies, all over the world.
But why did the USA military withdraw from Afghanistan? Every few years there arises some issue where I find myself in disagreement with my fellow progressives, and Afghanistan was the main one of the last 5 years.
For the USA, the war in Afghanistan formally ended on December 28, 2014, when President Obama gave a speech and announced the end of all combat activity in Afghanistan. The text of that speech is here:
After that, the USA ran no combat missions and suffered no combat deaths till August of 2021.
As with any nation where the USA has a military base, there were a few deaths on military bases. In 2019, the USA had 5 military deaths in Kuwait, 11 in Egypt, and 34 in Afghanistan -- all roughly proportional to the size of the deployments in those countries.
Last summer, when the withdrawal from Afghanistan was occurring, I had many conversations with progressives who seemed to be ignorant of the basic facts of the situations. Many of them asked "Why should our troops continue to die in battle in Afghanistan" when in fact no such thing had happened since 2014.
If a few deaths on a military base are enough for us to withdraw, then presumably the USA should also withdraw from Germany, Italy, Korea, Taiwan, Kuwait, Egypt, etc. I pointed this out on Twitter, but people told me that I was either a troll or very badly informed.
The USA has 800 bases in over 50 countries. One can make the argument that the USA should shut down all of its bases, renounce empire, and bring all of its troops back home, and so therefore it was important to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. I disagree with the idea, but at least that is an intellectually coherent position to argue for. But suggesting we needed to end our training mission in Afghanistan, while we continue to offer training missions in a dozen other dangerous countries, does not make any sense.
As to the argument that the USA should renounce empire, close all of its bases, and bring all the troops home, I think some of the bases are unnecessary, and in some places the USA is overextended, but those decisions are technical ones that can be left to a commission to focus on the issue of closing bases, just as was done in 1992/1993 when the USA shrank the military because the Cold War had ended.
But the idea that the USA should close every base is not realistic. The world is full of bad actors who hate democracy, and despite all the flaws of the USA, it does often fight on the right side. As we see now with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is essential to democracy that the USA can play a role in organizing the Western democracies to marshal a response against Russian aggression.
So why did the USA leave Afghanistan, while remaining in several dozen other countries, some of them very dangerous? Here we can say that the Biden Administration simply made a mistake.