Taliban's Third Anniversary in Kabul: Harris Under Fire for Afghanistan Withdrawal

As the Taliban celebrates their third anniversary of returning to power in Kabul, Afghanistan, Republicans have been quick to tie Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris to America’s tragedy-marred withdrawal from the city in August 2021. Harris famously claimed to be the “last person in the room” with President Joe Biden before he made the decision to pull out the last American troops by September 11, 2021, and she has not distanced herself from the policy.

Earlier this month, a Harris aide said the vice president “strongly supported President Biden’s decision to end America’s longest war.” Struggling for purchase in a transformed race, Harris’s opponents have begun invoking such remarks to saddle the surging candidate with an alleged “disaster” and “catastrophe.”

Far from being a blunder, though, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan delivered an important counterterrorism win for America. That’s a legacy that Harris should embrace on the campaign trail and build upon if elected commander-in-chief.

There is no question that the airlift of "over 120,000 US citizens," Afghans and allied nationals in just seventeen days was tragically flawed. Two-thirds of the way through, on Aug. 26, 2021, a suicide bomber from the local branch of Islamic State killed thirteen U.S. servicemembers and 170 Afghans who were crowded by the Abbey Gate of Hami Karzai International Airport.

Despite this horrific attack, there is no evidence that the withdrawal Biden and Harris settled on was too fast or too comprehensive. First, because the alternatives proposed are detached from the context of the twenty-year war. Second, because the three years since America’s departure have been some of the most fruitful for the campaign against the Islamic State, the "world’s deadliest terrorist group" and the focus of U.S. counterterrorism.

Critics of the Biden-Harris policy contend a slower withdrawal could have foiled the suicide attack. Some also maintain that leaving behind a residual U.S. military force (of some 2,500 troops) would have enabled the United States and Afghan Special Forces to hunt the perpetrators, Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), as the group is known, while keeping an eye on the Taliban. Such hypotheticals, although superficially appealing, do not hold up. The most likely consequence of delaying a full withdrawal would have been to needlessly endanger U.S. servicemembers by pitting them against a renewed war with the Taliban.

The Feb. 29, 2020, U.S.-Taliban peace agreement brought a long-needed ceasefire between the two signatories' troops and fighters. Unfortunately, it also gave President Donald Trump's successor a narrow window – just over four months (until May 31, 2021) – to remove all U.S. troops.

When Biden stretched the timeframe by roughly 100 days, the Taliban vowed to attack any foreign forces that remained after the revised deadline. Finishing the withdrawal on Aug. 30 spared U.S. troops from a resumption of conflict, which had already taken the lives of 6,200 US servicemembers and contractors and cost more than $2.3 trillion. The upshot: if Biden and Harris had opted to keep our troops in Afghanistan even longer, they would have been responsible for the needless deaths of far more Americans than were murdered at Abbey Gate.

Why “needless”? Because it turned out the best weapon against the so-called Islamic State is an actual state or at the least, a functioning national administration, something the Taliban have delivered. After twenty years of American sacrifice, it is now the Taliban spending precious blood and treasure fighting terrorism in Afghanistan.

As soon as the U.S. military was gone, the de facto authorities trained their firepower on ISKP, long a mortal enemy of the Taliban. In the first twelve months after U.S. forces left, ISKP operations dwindled and political violence in Afghanistan dropped by 80%.

In spring 2023, Taliban forces even took out the ringleader of the Abbey Gate bombing. For counterterrorism, Biden and Harris were absolutely right not to extend America’s presence a minute longer. The absence of U.S. troops and stability – and the presence of an indigenous government – undermined ISKP's narrative that its members were fighting Western "crusaders."

Without minimizing the lives lost or left behind in Afghanistan, any serious analysis must recognize the U.S. withdrawal, on balance, netted a significant gain for U.S. national security. As I observed during an eleven-day road trip across Afghanistan last fall, America’s departure helped to stabilize the country after decades of conflict.

For the first time since 1979, Afghanistan is not under foreign occupation or engulfed in civil war. Those conditions bode well for the fight against foreign terrorist organizations and the conditions that produce them. The logical next step is for Biden and Harris – or Harris and Walz – to follow the Afghanistan withdrawal by pulling out the 3,400 troops America still has in Iraq and Syria, countries where Islamic State has already been crushed and the local states are willing and able to prevent its return.

Jason Brownlee, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, is completing a book about America's wars in South Asia and the Middle East.