Instead of trying to improve on Trump’s peace deal, Biden should just start over.
When President Joe Biden took office, he inherited a foreign policy disaster in Afghanistan. A year ago, his predecessor’s envoys negotiated an agreement with the Taliban that said the last U.S. troops would leave the country by May 1. That’s just six weeks away, and leaving then would mean the collapse of the elected government the U.S. helped create. And yet a decision to stay past May would put remaining U.S. forces at risk of renewed Taliban attacks. The wise course for Biden would have been to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan but call out the Taliban for violating the agreement and work to negotiate a more durable deal. After all, according to a Jan.4 memo from the Treasury Department’s inspector general, “al-Qaeda is gaining strength in Afghanistan while continuing to operate with the Taliban under the Taliban’s protection.” The February 2020 agreement requires the Taliban to instruct its members to end cooperation with al-Qaeda and pursue people and organizations that threaten U.S. national security. That should be enough to render the agreement’s deadline moot. Unfortunately, the Biden administration appears to have made a decision that gives the U.S. the worst aspects of both options. Biden now says meeting the May 1 deadline for troop withdrawal will be “tough,” but he also predicts U.S. forces will not stay in the country much longer. In other words: U.S. forces will stay, risking a new round of attacks from the Taliban. But they will not stay long, depriving the U.S. of its already dwindling leverage to force the Taliban to adhere to the 2020 deal. Actually, it’s even worse than that.
