Republicans are already using the Afghan withdrawal to argue for more war
The United States’ long-overdue departure from Afghanistan was always going to be messy, thanks to two decades of mismanaged and misguided occupation.
But even by that standard, the current withdrawal has been poorly executed, leaving the Biden administration with both short- and long-term problems. In the near term, the United States needs to evacuate thousands of Americans still in the country and welcome as many Afghan refugees as possible. In the longer term, the White House needs to resist those who would use the withdrawal to argue for a more confrontational foreign policy elsewhere.
Already, Republicans are encouraging the canard that the Afghanistan withdrawal undermines U.S. strength elsewhere.
“You have Iran, I think, with a very, very radical brand-new president … saying, we think — we like — we get to be more aggressive with Israel, more aggressive with Saudi Arabia,” argued former House speaker Newt Gingrich on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”
“You already see countries like China threatening Taiwan and saying that America won’t come to their aid,” added Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on the same Fox News show.
“It’s not just damage in Afghanistan, it’s damage globally for the United States,” said Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
On the Sunday talk shows, these comments were mostly asides, but they signal how Republicans — and other interventionist voices — will approach foreign policy debates after Afghanistan: President Biden was weak, therefore the United States needs to show it can’t be pushed around elsewhere.
There will, no doubt, be some openness, in some quarters of the White House, to a future show of strength, just as some Democrats turned hawkish in the weeks and months after Sept. 11. That course should be rejected. First off, although Americans are understandably concerned about how the troops were drawn down, a new CBS News Poll shows, even with hindsight, 63 percent still support the withdrawal. There’s no reason to think that the same public would have any appetite for more intervention elsewhere just because of a bungled evacuation.
But more broadly, “restoring” America’s image through confrontation is never as clear-cut as its supporters claim. Just look at what Biden’s critics say was working in Afghanistan: “We needed to maintain a presence on the ground, 3,500 forces, counterterrorism operations, counterintelligence operations,” said Cheney. At a similar troop level, said former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” “under four years of Trump, Afghanistan was safe.” The only way that the status quo was “safe” was if Afghan lives don’t count; thousands of Afghan civilians died during that period — and 1,659 perished in the first half of this year alone.
The truth is that Americans only support intervention if prolonged troop deployments are not involved. We saw this in the run-up to the Iraq War, when Gen. Eric Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would be needed for postwar Iraq. Knowing the public would never support such a commitment, the Bush administration quickly rejected that figure; then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz labeled it “wildly off the mark.” Events would prove Shinseki right. The complex view that the public holds about intervention without long deployments is worth remembering when Cotton and others suggest shows of strength from the Middle East to the Taiwan Strait.
The United States should do what it can to welcome refugees, stand up for democracy and support human rights around the world. But American leaders need to recognize the limits of aggressive, interventionist foreign policy — not just because the American people don’t support it, but because decades of poorly conceived and executed overseas adventures show us that these quests rarely succeed. Cooperation, not confrontation, must be the default solution. The roots of this month’s disastrous withdrawal lie with some of its biggest critics. Following their advice will only repeat the catastrophe.
James Downie is The Washington Post’s Digital Opinions Editor. He previously wrote for The New Republic and Foreign Policy magazine.
