Securing the Least Bad Outcome: The Options Facing Biden on Afghanistan.

• Author: Jenkins, Brian Michael

In one of the most difficult decisions of his nascent administration, President Joseph Biden must very soon decide whether to withdraw the remaining 2,500 U.S. troops from Afghanistan to meet a May 1 deadline agreed to by the Trump administration. In launching a major diplomatic effort to advance the Afghan peace process in early March 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken made clear in a letter to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani that as the "policy process continues in Washington, the United States has not ruled out any option." (1)

This article examines other possible courses of action the Biden administration could take if this diplomatic effort does not result in a major breakthrough in the coming weeks. What makes a decision on which path to follow so difficult is that each option carries a high risk of resulting in bad outcomes. As The New York Times recently put it:

If the Biden administration honors the withdrawal date, officials and analysts fear the Taliban could overwhelm what's left of the Afghan security forces and take control of major cities like Kandahar in a push for a complete military victory or a broad surrender by the Afghan government in the ongoing peace negotiations. But if the United States delays its withdrawal deadline, as a congressionally appointed panel recommended on Feb. 3, the Taliban would most likely consider the 2020 deal with the United States void, which could lead to renewed attacks on American and NATO troops, and potentially draw the United States deeper into the war to defend Afghan forces, whom the Taliban could still retaliate vigorously against. (2) To a significant degree, the challenge facing President Biden is therefore to make the decision that leads to the least bad outcomes. Because his decision will have reverberations far beyond the future of Afghanistan, he will need to take account of the enduring threat posed by a global jihadi terror movement that could again threaten the United States from Afghanistan. The president will also need to weigh other key strategic and geopolitical interests of the United States, as well as the appetite of the American public for ongoing military commitments overseas and the budgetary pressures facing the United States a year into the global coronavirus pandemic.

The following discussion will focus first on the current strategic and political context. Next, it will focus on the nature of the continuing terrorist threat. It will then turn to the 2009 debate about troop levels in Afghanistan at the beginning of the Obama administration when then Vice President Biden offered a different view on how the United States should proceed. The article will then examine the diplomatic and political complexities of the decisions facing now President Biden--they are far more than purely military calculations. The section after this will review the president's options with regard to Afghanistan by weighing the arguments for and against what the author identifies as six different possible courses of action. The final section offers some concluding observations.

The Strategic and Political Context

Twenty years later, the 9/11 attacks, in which 2,977 people were killed, may seem a distant memory to many, eclipsed by the death toll of the coronavirus, which in the first two months of 2021 on average killed roughly that number of Americans daily. But as recent events attest, the global terrorist campaign begun by Usama bin Ladin three decades ago has not ended. Jihadi groups continue to plot major terrorist operations from abroad, while they incite homegrown terrorists to carry out attacks wherever they are.

In April 2020, German police thwarted a plot targeting U.S. and NATO air bases by a terrorist cell that was receiving instructions from the Islamic State in Syria and Afghanistan. (3) Between September and November 2020, there was a surge in jihadi terrorist attacks in Europe, including an Islamic State-inspired attack on the streets of Vienna. (4) In early February 2021, Danish and German authorities arrested 14 individuals, including three Syrians, for plotting a jihadi terrorist attack. (5)

On this side of the Atlantic, the U.S. Department of Justice in mid-December 2020 unsealed an indictment revealing the existence of a new plot to hijack an airliner and carry out a 9/11-style attack in the United States. (6) U.S. authorities have been largely--but not always--successful in interrupting such plots. (7) But as we have seen before, in the first year of the George W. Bush administration, a single bloody attack could change the narrative and sabotage the new administration's agenda.

The Biden administration faces daunting domestic challenges--taming the still-raging coronavirus pandemic, which will require accelerating the rate of vaccinations; restoring an economy cratered by the pandemic, while leading a deeply divided nation; restoring morale and public trust in battered government institutions; and confronting an unreconciled opposition and continuing challenges to his legitimacy. Abroad, the new administration must address the challenges posed by an assertive China, an aggressive Russia, a belligerent Iran, and an unpredictable North Korea, always dangerous at the best of times but especially when ignored. Repairing alliances, starting with NATO, will also be a challenge for the new administration.

Jihadi terrorism does not top the list of the new administration's immediate concerns, but the threat remains and could grow. President Biden will have to decide whether and how fast to continue American troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a smaller contingent in Syria, and to what extent the United States will continue its military support for local counterterrorism operations in other African and Asian countries. There will be pressure to reduce the defense budget in order to address immediate domestic concerns, finance the national shift toward great-power competition, and get the country out of the seemingly endless wars that started with the Global War on Terror in 2001. (8)

Americans view war as a finite undertaking, not an enduring condition. Instead of anything that resembles "military victory," nearly 20 years of fighting, at great cost in blood and treasure, have produced what has been variously described as a "modicum of success," (9) "fragile gains," (10) and a "dismal failure." (11) Many ask why we do not just call it quits and bring the troops home, let other countries fend for themselves. This thinking encapsulates the views of the previous administration.

When to withdraw from Afghanistan is not just about bringing American forces home, although that will be the most salient and immediate question facing the administration. It is about how the United States will continue to defend itself against foreign and foreign-inspired terrorist threats against U.S. targets abroad and especially on U.S. soil.

For the past quarter-century, U.S. counterterrorism strategy has been driven by the assumption that security at home depends on engaging the terrorists abroad: "We will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America." (12) This linkage seemed clear immediately after 9/11; those responsible for the attack had to be scattered and destroyed before they could carry out further--potentially even larger-scale--attacks.

There is no exchange rate that tells us how many troops deployed to fight terrorists and their allies abroad reduces the risk of a particular number of foreign-directed or-inspired terrorist attacks in the United States. We cannot say that withdrawing a certain number of troops from Afghanistan increases risk here by a certain number of percentage points.

Some would argue that the equation goes the other way: Continuing U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and the Middle East inflame our foes, boost their recruiting, and increase the likelihood of further terrorist attacks. Al-Qa'ida propaganda certainly exploited the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. A new wave ofjihadi attacks in the United States only began six years later. (13)

At the same time, the number of U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan has plummeted by more than 90 percent since 2012; (14) it declined in Iraq after 2007, resulting in complete withdrawal in 2011. The number of jihadi terrorist attacks and plots in the United States reached a high point in 2015 and 2016. (15) That peak coincided with the rise of the Islamic State in 2014 and the return of U.S. troops to Iraq that year to lead the campaign to destroy the group. These events provide evidence for both sides of the argument--the rise of jihadi groups abroad can prompt terrorist attacks in the United States, which may decline when the United States goes after the groups, but engaging them militarily can also provoke a violent backlash and revenge attacks.

We must take care here not to fall into what Lieutenant General (Ret) H. R. McMaster has called "strategic narcissism," that is, the view that the level of the terrorist threat is determined exclusively by what the United States does. (16) Doing so underestimates the risks of both military intervention and military extrication. It is narcissistic in that it overestimates the role of U.S. decisions and ignores the agency of the terrorist foes--as if Washington has exclusive control of the volume switch.

As a veteran of the Vietnam War, I find that this has a familiar ring. From the Pentagon to the U.S. headquarters in Saigon down to the local U.S. district advisor, that war was viewed exclusively through briefing slides that counted the things we could count, mostly our "inputs?--troop strength, number of sorties, tonnage of ordnance, and so on. Enemy actions were seen as responses to what the United States did. (17) Rarely did U.S. commanders in Vietnam or political leaders in Washington mentally switch sides to ask, what do the enemy's briefing slides say? They were...