Biden may find that one of his first acts as president will be to send more troops to a war he wanted to end 11 years ago
As President Donald Trump tries to end America’s longest war, he has settled on a compromise. Instead of withdrawing all US troops from Afghanistan by Christmas, as he boasted in a tweet in October, he will be leaving behind a small counterterrorism force. It’s tempting to view the development with a sense of relief. A full withdrawal from Afghanistan, or for that matter Iraq, would have been a humiliation for the US on the world stage and a likely prelude to the collapse of two elected governments for which America has invested significant blood and treasure.
That said, avoiding calamity is not the same as wise statecraft. Trump’s final military act is reckless, particularly in Afghanistan. Officially, the US will be reducing from around 4,500 US troops to 2,500. (Some 500 of the 3,000 Americans in Iraq will also come home.) That will still mean, in theory, that the remaining forces will continue a counterterrorism mission against the Taliban and affiliated jihadists such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
But it will also severely reduce the ability to train Afghan forces in the field. It will make it nearly impossible to recruit informants who provide context to intelligence collected through technical means, including overhead drone flights and intercepting digital communications.Most important, a troop reduction at this moment undermines America’s diplomatic strategy. Earlier this year, the US negotiated an interim agreement with the Taliban that tied troop reductions to the Taliban’s reduction in attacks and commitment to negotiating an end to its war against the government in Kabul…
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