August 31, 2021 became a historic date as the picture of U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue appeared on the news as the last American servicemember to leave Afghanistan. Major media outlets and social media all had headlines indicating that the US war in Afghanistan was finally over. President Joe Biden also addressed the nation – and the world – and defended his decision to withdraw, saying, “I was not going to extend this forever war, and I was not extending a forever exit” and “It’s time to end the war in Afghanistan.”

But is the war really over?

It’s true that for the first time in 20 years, there is no US military presence in Afghanistan. But two facts suggest that the war is not really over.

Over this past weekend, the US launched “‘over-the-horizon’ air strikes” in Afghanistan, which is a fancy way of saying “drone strikes.” The Biden administration conducted two drone strikes in the country, targeting militants from the Islamic State-Khorasan (ISK), the group responsible for the suicide bombing at the Kabul airport on August 27. The bombing killed 13 US servicemembers and 169 Afghans by the latest count. The Pentagon claimed that one of the drone strikes killed multiple members of ISK who were planning more suicide attacks in Kabul. The missile used, referred to as the “ninja bomb” by the Pentagon, uses a special technology that is designed to reduce civilian causalities. Yet, the strike in Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan also killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children.

For years now, the Pentagon has claimed that drone strikes are one of the most effective and efficient way to target terrorist groups, and ensure no American casualties. But what about the non-American casualties? Shouldn’t the United States care about those, especially when the alphabet soup of terrorist groups that are currently operating in Afghanistan are largely in part due to the destructive policies the US engaged in during the Cold War in the region? Setting aside the amnesia that plagues US foreign policy, there is now ample evidence that clearly shows that drone strikes are not effective or efficient at killing terrorists, and instead cause more harm by killing innocent civilians and destroying key infrastructure, which is already scarce in war torn countries like Afghanistan. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalists, between 300–909 Afghan civilians have been killed as a result of drone strikes, which does not include those injured. Have things gotten much better than in 2012, when a government study suggested 90 percent of people killed in these kinds of air strikes were not the intended targets?

In addition to the drone strikes, which are likely to continue as ISK gains more traction in the country, the second factor that should give us pause is President Biden’s rhetoric. In his address following the attack on the Kabul airport, President Biden vowed revenge, saying:

To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this: We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay. I will defend our interests and our people with every measure at my command.

President Biden’s speech sounds familiar to the speech President George W. Bush gave after the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which he said, “Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done” and “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”

The desire to seek revenge is natural, and having had a son who served in the military, President Biden is acutely aware of the experience – and pain – of military families. But if President Biden is serious about ending America’s “forever wars,” and if he wants ending these kinds of wars to be his legacy, then he must really end the wars — and that includes the vast majority of drone strikes as well. 

No troops on the ground, therefore, does not mean that the war is over. It simply means that one method of waging war in Afghanistan is no longer occurring.

I have an article in the new issue of the Independent Review covering American strategy from 9/11 to the present. As somebody who never aspired to be a historian (“It’s just telling stories!”), it led me to a greater respect for their craft. Telling stories in a way that adequately summarizes any given period is hard!

The essay concludes,

Domestically, abundant resources and permissive mass opinion left the American foreign-policy elite free to roam. Traditional guns-versus-butter trade-offs were almost irrelevant as the United States significantly expanded both domestic welfare spending as well as defense spending. Meanwhile, the American foreign-policy elite sold the public both a nationalistic, America First story about prevention as well as a liberal story that assured Americans that because the United States was a liberal state, the exercise of American power would benefit oppressed peoples across the globe (see Desch 2008; Mearsheimer 2018, 120–216).

Powerful as the United States was, the American foreign-policy elite dreamed up policies extravagant enough to outstrip that power. During the period from 2001 to 2021, the United States destroyed political orders in Iraq and Libya, prolonged civil wars in Afghanistan and Syria, and danced on the brink of war with Iran. During this same period, by its own scorekeeping, its trade policies created a monster in the form of a much more powerful People’s Republic of China.

[…]

No one was held accountable for the failures of the era. In contexts where the stakes are extremely high and power is concentrated in the hands of a few, accountability is vital.

North Korea restarted a reactor at the Yongbyon nuclear complex according to a new report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The reactor, which has been dormant since December 2018, produces plutonium for North Korea’s nuclear weapons. The amount of plutonium the reactor will eventually produce is currently unclear, but a resumption of activity at the Yongbyon nuclear complex should not come as a surprise.

North Korea has not been a major foreign policy concern thus far in the Biden administration’s tenure. This is understandable given the administration’s efforts to end the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, the COVID-19 pandemic’s resurgence, and the lack of North Korean provocations. However, a lack of attention does not mean a lack of activity.

A couple weeks before Biden’s inauguration, Kim Jong Un made an important report to the 8^th Party Congress that set the priorities for his regime over the next several years. Kim’s report mentioned several improvements to North Korea’s nuclear forces, including making better versions of capabilities that were already tested and developing new capabilities such as low-yield warheads. The reactor at Yongbyon and a nearby radiochemical laboratory represent the only publicly known facilities in North Korea that produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. A resumption of activity at the Yongbyon reactor is therefore a strong indicator that North Korea is following through on Kim Jong Un’s January orders to improve the country’s nuclear arsenal.

The Trump administration had an opportunity to prevent this reactor restart from happening. North Korea paused activity at the reactor in December 2018 in the lead up to the February 2019 summit meeting between Trump and Kim in Hanoi. Yongbyon was one of the items that Kim was prepared to negotiate about at the summit. Reportedly, North Korea offered to scale back its activities at Yongbyon in exchange for sanctions relief, though the exact scale of what Kim was willing to give up (e.g. complete dismantlement or just a freeze of activities) is unclear. Trump and his negotiating team thought the deal was not good enough and tried to push a “more for more” solution that Kim turned down, and U.S.-North Korea nuclear diplomacy has been stuck in a stalemate ever since.

To its credit, the Biden administration is trying to engage North Korea in working level talks, although Pyongyang has not responded to these overtures. Biden’s desire to chart a middle path between the Obama administration’s “strategic patience” and Trump’s leader-to-leader summit diplomacy is well intentioned, but the Yongbyon reactor activity shows that North Korea will not sit on its hands. Kim Jong Un is not eager to re-run the nuclear crisis of 2017 in the near future, but in the absence of diplomatic progress he has made it clear that he will continue improving and growing the nuclear arsenal.

If it wants to prevent any further improvements to North Korea’s nuclear forces, the Biden administration will have to play a bolder diplomatic game. A return to maximum pressure might be an attractive political option, especially if the White House wants to look tough after the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden must take care to resist such an impulse. The extended nuclear crisis of 2017 demonstrates that North Korea will repay pressure with pressure. Diplomacy with North Korea is therefore the best option for reducing nuclear tensions, but any breakthrough will likely require a bolder approach than continued insistence on working level negotiations.

Hopefully such a breakthrough will happen before North Korea has the time to use its newly produced plutonium to create a new generation of nuclear weapons.

The American withdrawal from Kabul in Aug 2021 made many people recall the scenes of the American withdrawal from Saigon in April 1975. That is indeed a helpful analogy, because the Taliban of today has similarities to the Vietcong of the past. Both are popular militia forces mobilized against American forces of occupation, only to establish authoritarian regimes after the latter’s departure. (The big difference, of course, is that while the authoritarian ideology of the Vietcong was communism, that of the Taliban is Islamism — a politicized and oppressive interpretation of Islam disfavored by the majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.)

Yet there is more to this historical analogy: In 1975, besides the Vietcong, there was another communist militia, which was much more fanatic and bloodthirsty: the Khmer Rouge, the worst of the worst among all communists, which would kill 2 million people in the next 3 years. It was finally overthrown in 1978, thanks to none other than the Vietnamese communists, who helped established a relatively more moderate regime in the neighboring Cambodia.

That old distinction between the Vietcong and the Khmer Rouge is somewhat similar to the new distinction between the Taliban and the “Islamic State,” or IS (including its local version, “IS-Khorasan,” or IS‑K). Yes, Taliban is savage. But since the IS is so much more savage, Taliban appears as a lesser evil, which may even help the U.S. and its allies against the worst of the worst.

Surely, the communist ideology shared by both the Vietcong and the Khmer Rouge (as as well the USSR and Maoist China) was a totalitarian menace that the West should have defeated — as it luckily did, to a great extent. But this defeat did not come thanks to American troops occupying communist countries one by one to “liberate” them. (If anything, that boosted communism, as in Vietnam.) Rather it came because communism was doomed to fail because its own deficiencies. All the West had to do — and rightly did — was to keep freedom alive and robust, to make its own democracies work well.

It is still what America should do today in the face of Islamist totalitarians: Just keep freedom alive and preserve liberal democracy, so most Muslims see (as many of them already do) that religious freedom is much better for them than religious tyranny. In the meantime, don’t forget that there are important shades and grades among whom you consider as the enemy. It can help devise wiser foreign policy.

Yesterday, President Joe Biden addressed the nation as the Taliban took over Kabul. In his remarks, he stood firmly by his decision to leave Afghanistan, saying,

I’m now the fourth American President to preside over war in Afghanistan — two Democrats and two Republicans. I will not pass this responsibly on — responsibility on to a fifth President.

He also said:

I cannot and I will not ask our troops to fight on endlessly in another — in another country’s civil war, taking casualties, suffering life-shattering injuries, leaving families broken by grief and loss. This is not in our national security interest.

He is right to stand by his decision. It was time for the U.S. to leave Afghanistan. In fact, the U.S. achieved its goals, which were to dismantle al Qaeda in Afghanistan and capture Osama bin Laden within the first decade of the war. Even as past presidents like Barack Obama and Donald Trump tried to leave, they were unable to. Something like this outcome was inevitable.

What was not inevitable, however, is the incompetent way the U.S. left Afghanistan. While Biden had announced that all U.S. troops would leave by September 11, 2021, the 20^th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the U.S., the withdrawal was basically complete by mid-August. In fact, U.S. troops left the Bagram airbase in the middle of the night without telling the new Afghan commander. To say that the withdrawal could – and should – have been handled better is an understatement.

But beyond the chaotic nature of the withdrawal, there are two things that Biden botched in his speech. The first is his criticism of the Afghan forces. Biden said,

American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong — incredibly well equipped — a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies.



We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force — something the Taliban doesn’t have. Taliban does not have an air force. We provided close air support.



We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.

It’s true, the U.S. did train and equip the Afghan forces for the last two decades. It’s easy to blame Afghan forces for not having the will to fight, but what President Biden failed to mention was lack of air power and Pentagon’s reliance on contractors to maintain the Afghan Air Force. The U.S. military has relied heavily on air power to keep its meager hold on Afghanistan. In July, President Biden had vowed that the Afghan Air Force would be able to maintain its capacity. According to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction report from April 2021, the Afghan Air Force had 162 aircraft, and 143 were “mission-capable” but their capacity was threatened due to a lack of spare parts, which were provided by U.S. contractors that left – and this is something that the Afghan lawmakers alerted the Biden administration to. Similarly, the U.S. was supposed to supply the Afghan military with 37 Black Hawk helicopters and retrain the pilots to increase the air force’s capacity, but were unable to, hindering the Afghan Air Force’s ability to maintain its fighting power and ability to fight the Taliban. So yes, the Afghan forces fell quickly – “This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated” – but it’s not reducible to lacking the will to fight.

Second, President Biden didn’t even mention the U.S. military’s inability to evacuate Afghan interpreters: People who not only helped the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, but were the main reason why the U.S. could stay in the country for as long as it did. These Afghans not only endangered their lives but also those of their immediate and extended families by helping U.S. troops and contractors, to now be left vulnerable to the depredations of the Taliban (or any other group). The Biden administration should have prioritized fixing the broken Special Immigrant Visa system and accelerating these visas. Why was this not done? Furthermore, the Biden administration should allow Afghan refugees to enter immediately. As Alex Nowrasteh argues, there is no good reason not to let Afghan refugees in. And frankly, it’s the least we can do after invading their country and occupying it for 20 years.

As the world prepares to recognize the Taliban, the Biden administration needs to grapple with its failures regarding the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. The president may not have answered any questions after this speech yesterday, but he won’t be able to avoid these questions, and others, much longer.

“There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy … of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”

That was how President Joe Biden responded on July 8 to a question regarding possible parallels between the withdrawal from South Vietnam in 1975 and the then-pending withdrawal from Afghanistan.

It is now clear that the administration’s assessment of the likely consequences was wrong. Three things are worth considering:

1. U.S. policy in Afghanistan has been based on self-delusion and outright lying to the American people and to Congress;
2. Few analysts were surprised by the Taliban’s strength; most were surprised by the government’s feather-in-the-wind dissolution, which is its own commentary after 20 years, $1 trillion, thousands of U.S. service members killed, and a generation of war; and
3. The important remaining U.S. interests are counterterrorism and attempting to rescue those who helped the U.S. war effort there.

U.S. policy in Afghanistan, and the government’s message to the American people about it, have been built on lies and delusions for almost the entire course of the war. The American people, having swallowed those lies, are now aghast.

Craig Whitlock at the Post has been covering the issue for years. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has been on the record for years. And nobody cared until it was too late.

To recap What We Knew and When We Knew It:

Jamie Ross, “Secret Documents Show We Were ‘Constantly Lied to’ by U.S. Officials Over ‘Unwinnable’ Afghan War,” Daily Beast, December 9, 2019.

Craig Whitlock, “Afghan War Plagued by ‘Mendacity’ and Lies, Inspector General Tells Congress,” January 15, 2020.

Similarly, journalist Spencer Ackerman, whom Cato hosted on Friday, was running through some of his old clips over the weekend and found a few of note:

“Military’s Own Report Card Gives Afghan Surge an F,” Wired​.com, September 27, 2012.

“‘Data-Entry Error’ Led Military to Falsely Claim Taliban Attacks Are Down,” Wired​.com, February 26, 2013.

“Military Decides You Shouldn’t See Key Data on Afghan Insurgency,” Wired​.com, March 6, 2013.

In fairness, American officials didn’t just lie to you: they lied to themselves, too. Michèle Flournoy, who helped implement President Obama’s Afghanistan surge at the Defense Department, recently explained that she had been hopeful because:

On trips to Afghanistan, she met frequently with young Afghans, including women’s groups, who shared America’s vision for the country. They wanted to send their daughters to school, serve in government, start businesses and nonprofits. They wanted women to be full participants in society and craved a predictable political and legal system. “We found all kinds of allies,” she said.

It should have been obvious that the sorts of people meeting with American defense officials would support the American mission in Afghanistan. With due respect to their rights and prerogatives, those people were far less relevant to the success or failure of the mission than were the men with guns.

What the administration got wrong was not the Taliban’s strength, which most analysts knew perfectly well. What it mistook was the strength of the Afghan government. In province after province, leaders literally handed the keys over to the Taliban.

In Ghazni, the governor “simply handed over his office to a senior Taliban commander. ‘He gave a flower to the Taliban commander and congratulated him,’” said an employee of the governor. Ismail Khan, a warlord known as “the Lion of Herat” appeared in a video released by the Taliban after his surrender saying “I hope all brothers can create a peaceful environment, so the war ends and we can have peace and stabilization in Afghanistan.” Only three months ago, former president Ashraf Ghani was telling Der Spiegel that his government could resist the Taliban “forever. If I did anything, it was to prepare our forces for this situation.”

It is a morbid thought, but if a Taliban takeover was inevitable, as it certainly appears now, we might be grateful that the people of Afghanistan avoided a civil war on the road to that destination. The experience in Syria, in which a brutal civil war resulted in Assad staying in power, seems like the worst possible outcome.

But it is distressing that all the U.S. effort over 20 years produced a government that immediately collapsed. In 2009, I helped organize a letter to President Obama warning that “Engaging in competitive governance with the Taliban is a counterproductive strategy… If we cannot leave Afghanistan until we have created an effective central government, we are likely to be there for decades, with no guarantee of success.”

There are two important issues to monitor going forward: U.S. diplomacy with the Taliban and the fate of translators, fixers, and others who helped U.S. forces.

The United States still has counterterrorism interests in Afghanistan. Simply folding our arms and refusing to talk to the Taliban is not an option. Mike Pompeo, of all people, defended his own diplomacy with the Taliban yesterday, saying “we did good work to crush al Qaeda. When we left office, there were fewer than 200 al Qaeda left in Afghanistan.” That work on establishing American counterterrorism objectives needs to continue, even in light of the Taliban takeover of the country.

In addition, the Biden administration’s analytical failure in thinking about how soon a Taliban takeover could occur is probably to blame for its sluggishness in processing Special Immigrant Visas for those people. They must speed up and clarify their policy on that issue.

More generally, if the fate of Afghanistan truly bothers Americans, they should vow to scrutinize the optimistic claims of their political and military leaders—before, during, and after our wars.

Do leaders, elites, and mass media shape public opinion on issues of war and terrorism from the top down? Or, in a more bottom-up fashion, does the public cling to certain ideas and fears to which national figures and a competitive news media then pander? Cato’s Senior Fellow John Mueller has a new White Paper out today entitled Public Opinion on War and Terror: Manipulated or Manipulating? in which he makes a persuasive, and controversial, case that, contrary to common assumptions and much commentary, public opinion is not very effectively manipulated from the top down and indeed it may work in the reverse direction. From the executive summary:

Leaders, elites, and the media may put ideas on the shelf, but that doesn’t mean people will buy them. And when they do, it may often be best to conclude that the message has struck a responsive chord rather than that the public has been manipulated.

As people sort through offerings on display, they pick and choose which ideas to embrace and which threats to fear. Some ideas become salient or even go viral while others stir no interest whatever. People can accept cues from those seeking to “manipulate” them—such as public officials, party leaders, opinion elites, the media, and advertisers. They can let themselves be affected by social and group influences or identities. They can respond to facts. They can apply rough, but ready, preexisting heuristics or attitudes, or “core” or “gut” values. Or they can simply succumb to whim and caprice.

This paper, mostly applying public opinion trend data, briefly illustrates the dynamic by assessing the public reaction in the United States to three episodes: First, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, focusing particularly on the fact that anxieties about terrorism persist despite reasonable expectations that they would have waned. Second, the extensive alarm inspired in the United States by the rise in 2014 of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Third, the 2003 Iraq War, evaluating the degree to which the George W. Bush administration was able to manage public opinion before and during the war, with some comparisons with public opinion on other wars, particularly the 1991 Gulf War.

In general, it finds that the public is not very manipulable at least on such salient issues as these. Indeed, it often appears that the public is manipulating the would‐​be manipulators more than the other way around. Moreover, after the public has clearly embraced a fear or idea, leaders, elites, and the media will often find more purchase in servicing the idea than in seeking to change it.

Mueller has been publishing important scholarly work on the intersection of public opinion and national security policy since the early 1970s. As the United States, in uneven fits and starts, begins transitioning out of the post‑9/​11 hysteria, this latest contribution is highly salient, in addition to being both counter-intuitive and compelling in its central claims. Read the paper here.