Three years ago, the U.S. military was at Kabul International Airport frantically organizing evacuation flights out of Afghanistan as the Taliban returned to power in the capital after a 20-year hiatus. The evacuation mission was rushed, and overwhelmed U.S. forces worked to get as many Afghans out of the country as possible. The last U.S. military plane took off from the airport on Aug. 31, ending a two-decade military mission — the longest in U.S. history.
The Biden administration came under significant criticism during and after the evacuation. Former national security adviser John Bolton said the Taliban would once again provide safe haven and support to al-Qaeda as it plotted attacks against the United States. Retired Gen. David Petraeus, the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, claimed the withdrawal damaged U.S. credibility around the world. Leon Panetta, CIA director and defense secretary during the Obama administration, went so far as to suggest Biden might have to send troops back to Afghanistan, as President Obama did in Iraq.
In the three years since, none of these apocalyptic predictions have come to pass. The weeks-long evacuation, however, remains a campaign theme: former President Trump constantly reminds rallies-goers of the “catastrophe in Afghanistan,” hoping to use the chaotic withdrawal as a referendum on the Biden-Harris administration’s foreign policy.
Let us not kid ourselves: Afghanistan under the Taliban regime is a bleak place. The Afghan people have seen their personal freedoms significantly curtailed. Women and girls face severe restrictions, including on their right to education, work and travel.
But the United States did not go to Afghanistan to turn the country into a democratic oasis. Rather, its goal was to punish al-Qaeda for the 9/11 terrorist attack and hold the Taliban accountable for harboring terrorists. Those goals were achieved early in the war, but Washington foolishly expanded the mission to transform Afghanistan's politics and society from the ground up.
For the United States, the measure of success in the future should not be the degree of progress of Afghan society (centuries of history have shown that Afghanistan is immune to foreign designs), but rather the ability of the United States to defend itself against terrorism emanating from Afghanistan. The United States has succeeded in doing so, and the Taliban government seems to understand that giving refuge to terrorists is a recipe for losing the power regained after 20 long years of fighting.
Although U.S. intelligence-gathering in Afghanistan is not perfect, the United States has far better knowledge of the country today than it did in the early 1990s, when the Taliban first controlled the country and gave Osama bin Laden a stronghold to plan operations. How do we know this? Because Washington was able to exploit technical and human intelligence sources to find and kill the highest-profile terrorist target in Afghanistan, former al-Qaeda chief Ayman Zawahiri. His death in a drone strike in July 2022 was precisely the kind of operation — clean, efficient, and targeted — that critics of the U.S. withdrawal argued would not be possible if Washington ordered all troops out.
In addition to dispatching terrorist leaders, the United States has also shown a remarkable ability to anticipate, if not predict, when terrorist attacks by groups based in Afghanistan are going to occur. Most of them involve the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K. Earlier this year, U.S. intelligence tracked ISIS-K threats in Iran and Russia and notified the governments of those countries. In both cases, according to public reports, the U.S. warnings specified the exact target that was about to be attacked. Those warnings went unheeded. In Iran, ISIS-K killed 84 people with a bomb; in Moscow, four gunmen claiming to be affiliated with ISIS-K murdered more than 140 people at a concert hall.
And what of the claim, so often heard in the weeks following the August 2021 withdrawal, that the Taliban would return to their old ways, aiding and abetting America’s terrorist enemies? This has not exactly come to pass, either. Although UN observers say that foreign fighters have indeed traveled to Afghanistan since the Taliban returned to power (there is no doubt that al-Qaeda maintains a presence there), those fighters do not have freedom of movement. Indeed, the same UN observers assess that the Taliban are seeking to restrict the fighters’ activities, if only to ensure that their own power is not challenged. The Taliban are monitoring some groups and fighting others (including ISIS-K), which is an improvement, from the American perspective, from their behavior before 9/11. The motivation is self-interest: the Taliban are reluctant to jeopardize their status and power by repeating the past.
As for the perception that US credibility is plummeting, nothing in the three years since the withdrawal suggests that Petraeus’s diagnosis is correct. In fact, the opposite is true. America’s allies and partners not only remain committed to their strategic relationships with Washington, but are seeking to expand them. In June, Japan and South Korea agreed to expand trilateral military exercises with the United States in their bid to preserve a favorable balance of power in East Asia. Washington’s NATO allies continue to look to the United States to lead the West’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Global approval of American leadership stands at 41%, down slightly from 45% in 2021 but unchanged from a decade ago.
Afghanistan remains a dangerous place, and hope for a better future for ordinary Afghans is slim. But the prediction that the withdrawal of U.S. troops would automatically lead to disaster for U.S. security has not come to pass.
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities. @DanDePetris
