The benefits of the withdrawal in terms of promoting competitiveness with China aren’t as compelling as they seem.
About the authors: Richard Fontaine is the chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security. Vance Serchuk is executive director of the KKR Global Institute and an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Announcing the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan two months ago, President Joe Biden invoked the need to focus on Washington’s No.1 foreign-policy priority: China. Ending the war would, the president argued, permit America to redirect its energies toward new, more pressing challenges, foremost among them “extreme” competition with an assertive Beijing. As a rising authoritarian superpower threatens to eclipse the United States technologically, militarily, and economically, the thinking goes, we can hardly afford to be tied down in an endless war. The idea that the U.S. needs to extricate itself from the greater Middle East to get serious about the Indo-Pacific has a natural appeal. It is also not new. The Obama administration similarly justified its withdrawal from Iraq as part of a pivot to Asia. Yet as details of the Biden administration’s post-withdrawal strategy for Afghanistan emerge, its benefits for American competitiveness against Beijing look nebulous. In fact, the U.S. departure from Kabul could end up undermining, rather than strengthening, America’s strategic hand against China. In practical terms, advocates of withdrawal offer three major ways that leaving Afghanistan could strengthen Washington in its intensifying rivalry with Beijing. It could liberate military resources currently tied down in Afghanistan, allowing them to be redeployed to the Indo-Pacific theater. It could free up the diplomatic and bureaucratic bandwidth of U.S. senior officials, permitting them to devote to China the time and attention otherwise consumed by the Afghan quagmire. And finally, it could save the U.S. government money, unlocking billions of dollars better devoted to fund initiatives that boost America’s standing in its competition with China. Each of these arguments is intuitively compelling. None, however, holds up. Begin with the military situation. The U.S. presence in Afghanistan had already been whittled away to less than a brigade’s worth of soldiers by the time Biden took office. A few thousand U.S. troops may have been enough to keep the Afghan government from falling to the Taliban, but their redeployment will do virtually nothing to alter the global balance of power. Shoring up America’s eroding military edge in the Indo-Pacific should be the Pentagon’s foremost priority, but the capabilities being withdrawn from Afghanistan represent a drop in that ocean. Still, if the U.S. were to cease all fighting in Afghanistan, one might argue that moving those troops and capabilities to the Indo-Pacific could signal heightened American commitment there. Yet the current plan is not to stop operations in Afghanistan but simply to launch them from outside the country. The Biden administration cannot end U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan for the simple reason that the terrorist threat there has not gone away.
