Departing Kabul.

• Author: Posen, Barry R.

The U.S.-led aerial evacuation of Western officials, citizens, and local partners from Kabul formed the denouement of a poorly conceived, incompetently managed, and historically futile project to turn Afghanistan into a self-sufficient, liberal, and unified country. Despite the fundamental flaws in U.S. policy over the last twenty years, newspapers, journals, talk shows, websites, and now U.S. congressional hearings have brimmed with efforts to point the finger of failure in Afghanistan at one man and his closest advisors: President Joe Biden.

This is disingenuous blame casting. The passion of much of the commentary would be a bit more tolerable had the authors, pundits, and congresspersons spent more time over the last ten years offering cold-eyed assessments of the ongoing difficulty of the Afghan project, honestly sharing those assessments with the American people, and then trying to convince them that the United States should nevertheless stay the course. The American people have wanted out of this war for a long time: Donald J. Trump ran, among other things, for office on a prompt withdrawal, and in his uniquely passionate but somehow desultory fashion moved that project forward. Biden ran on withdrawal and made good on his promise, but for practical reasons slowed the process that his predecessor had put in place.

Commentary on the Afghanistan disengagement, and the pattern of the questions in the recent Senate and House Armed Services Committee hearings, can be divided into two arguments. Some continue to assert, as they did before the disengagement, that the United States should have decided to stay in Afghanistan forever, and that the denouement somehow proves it. Others agree with presidents Trump and Biden but "Monday-morning-quarterback" the process, certain that they would have had a cleverer and cleaner way of getting out. Both positions should be challenged.

The main argument for leaving Afghanistan was and remains strategic. The security gains were neither commensurate with present, nor likely future, military and human costs.

Good U.S strategy has many elements. Fundamental is the notion of scarcity. Security resources of money, military people, and leadership attention are not infinite. They should be allocated across threats and opportunities in terms of their importance to our national security. Though the problem of terrorists with global ambitions remains, Al Qaeda as a group is not nearly as coherent as it once was. Al Qaeda and ISIS, its equally nihilistic cousin, in its many guises, are under constant observation and pressure. More importantly, since the 2001 attack on New York City and Washington, DC, expensive layers of defense have been put between aspiring terrorists and Western citizens. The U.S. intelligence budget has grown to $80 billion per year. Intelligence agents and special operations forces are globally on the prowl, looking for those plotting outrages. This effort is now institutionalized. Al Qaeda and ISIS are both less capable than they were at the height of their powers; Western defenses are much stronger than they were. To the extent that the Afghanistan effort suppressed...