Vox: Why Biden was so set on withdrawing from Afghanistan

[TomCADem]

This is a really interesting article that is based on excerpts from Bob Woodward's 2010 book, and with the passage of time, it appears to prove that Biden was ultimately correct in his assessment of the Afghanistan. Of course, things were not helped by the steps Trump took to strengthen the Taliban while also committing the US to an early withdrawal date without any plan on how to achieve that, but kudos to Biden for not just simply basing his decision on short term political optics.

https://www.vox.com/2021/8/18/22629135/biden-afghanistan-withdrawal-reasons

To understand President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan against the advice of the US military establishment, you need to go back to a debate that played out more than a decade ago, during the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency.

In 2009, the new Obama administration debated whether to “surge” troop levels in Afghanistan after nearly eight years of war had failed to quell the insurgency from the overthrown Taliban forces. Top generals asked early that year for 17,000 more US troops and then, having gotten those, asked for an additional 40,000 to try to weaken the Taliban and strengthen the Afghan government.

Then-Vice President Biden was consistently one of the biggest skeptics of the military’s recommendations. Throughout months of debate, he repeatedly raised the inconvenient point that the generals’ preferred strategy seemed extremely unlikely to lead to actual victory. “We have not thought through our strategic goals!” he shouted during the Obama administration’s first meeting on the war in Afghanistan.

All this was documented at the time in Bob Woodward’s deeply reported 2010 book Obama’s Wars. Biden did not actually support withdrawal at the time — he pushed for a more limited mission focused on counterterrorism, accompanied by a smaller troop surge than the military wanted.