Biden had a better option: The US could have maintained a small residual force in Afghanistan, in order to provide critical air support and reassurance to Afghan forces. Yes, this would have violated the deal that Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, struck with the Taliban in February 2020. But the Taliban have already violated that bargain. Biden was happy to overturn many of Trump’s other actions, making his insistence on upholding this deal is difficult to understand.
Biden said “the US is developing a counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability that does not require a physical presence in Afghanistan. But the Taliban overcame that “over-the-horizon” operations and grabbed the Throne of Afghanistan. An emergency evacuation of US embassy personnel and other American citizens from Kabul was seen, much like the evacuation from Saigon in 1975.
Robert Gates, who served as Secretary of Defence under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, wrote in 2014 that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades.” The hurried US withdrawal from Afghanistan proved Robert Gates was right.
