Biden’s “Full” Withdrawal From Afghanistan Comes With A Catch
US combat is unlikely to end in the beleaguered nation.
Troubling signs surround Joe Biden’s withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan; they suggest that U.S. violence there will continue long past 2021. Despite the dominant message from the media — the war is already over — we’ve learned that up to 1,000 troops will remain in the country indefinitely as a form of security. And recently, comments from the upper ranks of the military suggest that airstrikes will likely continue in Afghanistan after the Aug. 31 troop drawdown deadline. All of this is a problem.
The New York Times reported Sunday that the highest-ranked general engaged in Afghani combat operations has refused to commit to ending the nearly 20-year bombing campaign in Afghanistan after Aug. 31. The news comes in stark contrast to headlines — including from the Times itself — insinuating that U.S. combat operations in the country ended already at the beginning of this month. See for example “U.S. Leaves Its Last Afghan Base, Effectively Ending Operations,” the title of a story picked up by a litany of mainstream news sites starting on July 2.
The reported nonresponse on the issue of airstrikes comes from Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr., who apparently “is not going to be able to comment about the future of U.S. airstrikes after Aug. 31” for the foreseeable future. His remark follows news that the notional full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan will include leaving 650 to 1,000 troops in the country for the purposes of embassy protection and airport security.
Both McKenzie Jr. and Biden are sounding a familiar tune. In 2014, Barack Obama announced that an end to combat operations in Afghanistan would come in the year 2016. He promised specifically that the military would “draw down to a normal embassy presence in Kabul, with a security assistance component.” This direct promise never came to fruition, but there are even more components to the story that make it an unsettling precursor to what’s happening today.
Just after his self-defined full drawdown was declared, Obama made a comparison to another military rollback he’d overseen. Our troops in Afghanistan, he said, would scale back to a normal embassy presence, “just as we’ve done in Iraq.” For the 2014 Obama, the fullest conscionable troop reduction in Afghanistan would match one he already performed in Iraq as of the time of his speech. And yet the status of our military in Iraq today is quite different from what Obama described. Troop levels in the country drew down to 2,500 at the beginning of 2021. Politico recently announced that the role of these personnel would shift to an “advisory” one by the end of this year, but people familiar with the matter have stressed that the new plan “will not constitute a withdrawal of American forces from the country.”
What happened is clear. Obama removed troops from Iraq and redeployed them, doing so because the administration had not rethought the level of involvement necessary in the region. ISIS military success prompted another surge of U.S. troops, and the war that had supposedly ended was quickly rekindled. Boots returned to the ground, and as of today, they will remain there “indefinitely” if Politico’s source is to be believed.
These developments deserve our attention — not for us to relitigate Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq and the ISIS-fueled chaos that ensued, but rather for us to see that promises of a full withdrawal in the Middle East have often turned out to be false. They have been false in addition to being doublespeak that keeps troops stationed in the regions in question during periods of relative calm. The efforts of many to embrace Biden policy and forget Trump, while understandable, have elided how often drawdowns, and promises thereof, turned out to be empty or temporary — mere chapters in the larger tale of endless war. The comments on airstrikes from Gen. McKenzie Jr. indicate we may be at the beginning of just such a new chapter.
Several commanders-in-chief have declared the end of US involvement in Afghanistan, only to be thwarted in the end by our ongoing interests in the mineral-, oil-, and poppy-rich region. Building on campaign promises, Barack Obama once announced that an end to Afghanistan combat operations would come by year’s end 2014. He reversed his position that year, stating that 10,000 troops would remain after the deadline to help train Afghani forces. These remaining troops, too, he promised, would be gone by the end of his presidency. But once again he had to revise his claim, expressing a new desire to draw down to 5,500 personnel by the time of his leaving office. Unsurprisingly, he then switched gears again, proposing that 8,400 troops remain for the Trump administration to oversee.
Donald Trump also broke campaign promises to end Middle Eastern conflicts. He chose instead to escalate a drone bombing program inherited from George W. Bush by way of Obama. I focus more on the latter president because Obama’s relentless equivocating and penchant for troop surges arguably did more to weaken liberals’ commitments to anti-war positions than the Trump Derangement Syndrome that followed Obama’s exit from office. The shift in liberal priorities, however it came, has set up the media perfectly to downplay signs that Biden may not be ushering the war in Afghanistan to a definitive close.
Personalities such as Rachel Maddow have transitioned during the Obama and Trump years from Iraq doves to full-on war hawks, calling for greater militancy against states such as Russia and North Korea. In the subtitle of a 2020 book, Maddow condemns not only “corrupted democracy” and the “most destructive industry on Earth” but also “rogue state Russia.” Instead of denouncing Trump’s spinelessness and hypocrisy in continuing to rain hell upon innocents in the Middle East, Maddow and the rest of the liberal establishment focused near exclusively on Trump’s perceived weakness against Russia and other areas in its sphere of influence. And many liberals remain locked into partisan media ecosystems that have already begun a bellicose narrative regarding Biden’s apparently heroic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden will take us out of Afghanistan, they say, to focus more adamantly on China and Russia.
We could well be in the midst of a worst of all worlds scenario, one in which Biden ramps up hawkishness against ex-communist geopolitical rivals under the cover of halfhearted Middle-East drawdowns like those we’ve already seen. The ever-increasing military budget will continue to find outlet across the theatres of the Middle East and the new Red Scare — especially if bombings continue in Afghanistan. The mainstream media already sanitize the outcomes of drone strikes, and they have continuously provided pretext for a new troop surge to occur within the next few years: to wrest control from an emboldened Taliban, to save the women and girls of Afghanistan, and so on. The liberal realignment gives the media greater room to shelter the Biden administration from critique and to replicate quasi-propaganda from the military intelligence apparatus.
Even in the absence of a troop surge, pronouncing an end to the war in Afghanistan as airstrikes continue is nothing short of mendacious political posturing from media institutions. Bombings are intensifying, according to The Wall Street Journal, and now we’ve received word that the Aug. 31 “war-is-over” deadline may not apply to such efforts. This outcome is particularly disturbing considering the enormous amounts of collateral damage that result from drone and other bombing campaigns.
It is well known that bombs dropped by unmanned aerial vehicles typically hit — and maim, injure, and kill — human beings who are not the intended targets of the attack. These unintended victims make up as much as 90 percent of those wounded or killed in drone strikes, according to reports from The Intercept. Civilian casualties from these attacks are believed to be dramatically underreported; Trump did away with the formal reporting Obama briefly instated, and administration estimates systematically fall below those provided by independent organizations.
All of this means that anti-war voices in the government and civilian populations must continue to pressure the Biden administration on the issue of Afghanistan. Headlines implying peace are little solace to those living in the crosshairs of our military-industrial complex. We should call on our government to enact popular will and bring a firm end to this campaign of violence. We must not allow the war in Afghanistan to remain as endless as before, no matter what the media tell us.