{"id":307475,"date":"2021-07-24T15:47:57","date_gmt":"2021-07-24T12:47:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/why-republicans-must-resist-a-full-us-withdrawal-from-afghanistan\/"},"modified":"2021-07-24T15:47:57","modified_gmt":"2021-07-24T12:47:57","slug":"why-republicans-must-resist-a-full-us-withdrawal-from-afghanistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/why-republicans-must-resist-a-full-us-withdrawal-from-afghanistan\/","title":{"rendered":"#Why Republicans must resist a full US withdrawal from Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Why Republicans must resist a full US withdrawal from Afghanistan<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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When President Biden announced that American troops will withdraw from Afghanistan, ending a nearly 20 year war in that country, he likely counted on solid Republican support for the plan. After all, President Trump also announced his own prospective departure from Afghanistan, setting it for May 1, 2021.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As a result, many prominent Republicans, elected and otherwise, are either endorsing Biden\u2019s plan or declining to criticize it. A Politico-Morning Consult survey<\/a> places Republican app<\/a>roval for Biden\u2019s policy at 42 percent compared to 59 percent of registered voters nationally \u2014 a not insignificant showing of bipartisan agreement in a polarized time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, support for Trump\u2019s policy should not automatically entail support for Biden\u2019s.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As president, Trump changed the GOP\u2019s foreign-policy calculus, shifting the party away from the neoconservative nation-building and democracy-planting embraced so thoroughly by the Bush administration. In its place, he offered a helpful recalibration of America\u2019s foreign-policy scales. Recognizing, correctly, that ideological objectives had obscured the national interest, he called for decades of foreign entanglement to give way to a new, postwar era of domestic investment and prosperity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Republicans should be wary, however, of allowing a proper shift in priorities to lurch into a new form of counterproductive isolationism \u2014 one that could endanger the American homeland.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"US
US Army soldiers walk to their C-17 cargo plane for departure at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan.<\/figcaption>
Getty Images<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Any decisions should be made on the basis of facts, rather than ideology, and the facts in Afghanistan today are these: With a residual force of approximately 3,000 troops, the US has kept the Taliban from overrunning the country and maintained a fragile, democratically elected government in Kabul. In the years since September 11, 2001, Afghanistan has not been an easy refuge for al Qaeda or other terrorist groups that threaten America. And freedoms unknown under Taliban rule \u2014 especially for women and girls \u2014 have produced hope for a future in civil society. These are concrete and important gains, earned by the lives and treasure of the US and its allies \u2014 and directly relevant to American national security.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And yet, as Biden proceeds to withdraw troops by Aug. 31, America\u2019s former commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Scott Miller, has warned<\/a> of an emerging \u201ccivil war.\u201d As The Wall Street Journal reports<\/a>, US intelligence already anticipates the likely end of that war: In just six months, Afghanistan\u2019s government may collapse in defeat to the Taliban.\u00a0<\/p>\n

These realities provide ample evidence as to why Trump never actually executed a complete departure from Afghanistan, however much he wanted to do so, and however much he talked about it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Another crucial fact must be considered: If America is to leave Afghanistan, it matters just who is setting that policy and what the real plans and objectives are.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Will the Taliban fear retaliation from Biden as they would have from Trump, should they again harbor international terrorism? Biden and his administration make noise about continued support for the Afghan military, but will significant help ever materialize?\u00a0<\/p>\n

This seems doubtful, especially given the administration\u2019s highly convenient, disingenuous expressions of confidence in Afghan defense capability.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Listening to John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, speak<\/a> of Afghanistan\u2019s \u201cvery capable Air Force\u201d and \u201cvery sophisticated\u201d special forces, one would think that the undertrained, already-overwhelmed Afghan military is an elite fighting unit, able to repel the Taliban\u2019s rapidly advancing onslaught on its own. US intelligence agencies \u2014 and common sense \u2014 would disagree.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"President
President Obama\u2019s withdrawal of troops from Iraq in 2011 led directly to the rise of ISIS.<\/figcaption>
ZUMAPRESS.com<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A presidential policy is never made in the abstract. It is, instead, shaped and determined by the president who enacts it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For a clue to the future of Afghanistan during the Biden administration, one can look to the last time the US made a precipitous, forced, ill-planned departure from a theater of conflict. President Obama\u2019s withdrawal of troops from Iraq in 2011 led directly to the rise of ISIS \u2014 a threat Obama severely underestimated, and which he compared to \u201ca JV team<\/a>.\u201d The territorial ISIS caliphate was defeated only after the arrival of a different president with a very different approach: Trump, whose more aggressive military strategy turned the tide.\u00a0<\/p>\n

America should maintain its residual force in Afghanistan and protect its national security gains, purchased with such sacrifice over two decades. Republicans should also recognize: A complete Biden departure from the conflict does not equal a hypothetical Trump departure. This is a fact that the Taliban and its allies understand all too well.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Augustus Howard is a columnist focusing on national politics and foreign policy.<\/em>\n <\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Why Republicans must resist a full US withdrawal from Afghanistan” When President Biden announced that American troops will withdraw from Afghanistan, ending a nearly 20 year war in that country, he likely counted on solid Republican support for the plan. After all, President Trump also announced his own prospective departure from Afghanistan, setting it for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":307476,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/07\/afghanistan-war-soilders.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[112755,72315,991,25460,4947,112778],"class_list":["post-307475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-7-24-21","tag-afghanistan","tag-joe-biden","tag-middle-east","tag-opinion","tag-withdrawal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}