Three years ago, the U.S. military was at Kabul’s international airport frantically organizing evacuation flights out of Afghanistan as the Taliban returned to power in the capital city after a 20-year hiatus. The last U.S. military plane flew out of the airport on Aug. 31, ending a two-decade-long military mission, the longest in U.S. history.
The Biden administration received significant criticism both during and after the evacuation. Former national security advisor John Bolton said the Taliban would again provide a safe haven and support to Al Qaeda as it planned attacks against the United States.
Retired Gen. David Petraeus, a onetime commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, stated that the withdrawal damaged America’s credibility around the world. Leon Panetta, the CIA director and Defense secretary during the Obama administration, went so far as to suggest that President Joe Biden may eventually have to send troops back to Afghanistan as former President Barack Obama did in Iraq.
Let there be no mistake: Afghanistan under the Taliban is a dismal place. The Afghan people have seen a significant reduction in their personal freedoms. Women and girls face severe restrictions, including on their right to education, work and travel.
However, the U.S. didn’t go into Afghanistan to turn the country into a democratic oasis. Rather, the aim was to hammer Al Qaeda for the 9/11 terrorist attack and hold the Taliban accountable for sheltering terrorists. Those objectives were achieved very early on in the war, only for Washington to foolishly expand the mission toward remaking Afghanistan’s politics and society root and branch.
For the U.S., the measure of success going forward should not be how progressive Afghan society is — centuries of history have shown that Afghanistan is impervious to foreign designs — but whether the U.S. can still defend itself against terrorism emanating from Afghanistan. The U.S. has managed to do that, and the Taliban government seems to understand that harboring terrorists is a recipe for losing the power regained after 20 long years of fighting.
Although U.S. intelligence-gathering in Afghanistan is hardly perfect, the U.S. today possesses a far better understanding of the country than it did during the early 1990s. Washington was able to exploit technical and human intelligence sources to find and kill the most high-profile terrorist target in Afghanistan, former Al Qaeda chief Ayman Zawahiri. His death in a drone attack in July 2022 was precisely the kind of operation — clean, efficient and specific — that detractors of the U.S. withdrawal argued wouldn’t be possible if Washington ordered all troops out.
And what about the claim, heard so often in the weeks after the August 2021 withdrawal, that the Taliban would revert to its old ways, aiding and abetting America’s terrorist enemies?
This, too, hasn’t exactly come to pass. Although U.N. monitors say that foreign fighters have indeed traveled to Afghanistan since the Taliban returned to power — there’s no doubt Al Qaeda retains a presence there — those fighters don’t have unfettered movement. In fact, the same U.N. monitors assess that the Taliban is attempting to restrict the fighters’ activities. The motivation is self-interest: The Taliban is reluctant to jeopardize its status and power by repeating the past.
As far as notions of plummeting U.S. credibility, nothing in the three years since the withdrawal suggests that Petraeus’ diagnosis is correct. In fact, the opposite is the case. U.S. allies and partners not only remain committed to their strategic relationships with Washington but are seeking to expand them. Global approval of U.S. leadership is at 41%, slightly down from 45% in 2021 but the same as it was about a decade ago.
Afghanistan is still a dangerous place and hope for a better future for ordinary Afghans is low. But the prediction that the U.S. troop departure would automatically lead to disaster for U.S. security hasn’t come to pass.
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities. Follow him on X at @DanDePetris. He wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.